Bearing the weight: A phenomenological study of burnout and stress among medicolegal death investigators.

Medicolegal death investigators sit at the nexus of forensic science, the criminal justice system, and family-facing trauma response, often engaging all three in a single case. They are a critical part of the criminal justice system, yet one of the least studied groups of practitioners in the burnout literature. The current study employed a hermeneutic phenomenological design and reflexive thematic analysis as the analytic process to explore the experience and understanding of burnout among 16 medicolegal and coroner investigators from 9 U.S. states in the context of their everyday work. Semi-structured interviews were conducted via Zoom and analyzed using NVivo 14. Six interrelated themes emerged from the data: social climate, environmental variability, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, lack of support, and personal disposition. Annual caseloads ranged from 265 to greater than 1000 per investigator. That volume is comparable to or exceeds the recommended maximum of 250 autopsies per year per forensic pathologist from the National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME), the most similar published professional workload standard, and chronic understaffing was nearly universal. Investigators frequently mentioned being "forgotten" by their organizations and the larger criminal justice system. Peer recognition, intentional self-care, and what participants called dispositional awareness functioned as protective resources. The findings suggest that burnout in this population is less a failure of individual coping and more a structural consequence of organizational neglect, with implications for leadership practice, mental health policy, and workforce retention in medicolegal agencies.