When i was in the police (UK) we did crime scene training, and a few hours of it involved talking about how we can try and cope when seeing a dead body for the first time.

The advice we were given is that basically they are no longer a person. They are a fleshy meat sack which we should consider as being evidence of a potential crime. We were told to ignore the body and concentrate on the scene.

What can we see/smell/hear. Document everything. Were lights on/off, were doors locked/unlocked. Windows open/closed. Smashed glass on the inside of the house or the outside.

It didn’t matter if it was suspicious or not. We were reminded we weren’t detectives, we weren’t there to solve a murder, just secure evidence.

And it worked. Found a dead person on my second day. She, like every other sinilar job I’d been to had died of natural causes. But I remembered my training and just did my job.

Other cops would rely on humour. Ignore the corpse, crack jokes.

And yes, we were shown pictures of incredibly gruesome scenes. My favourite was the embolism, looked like a scene from Saw.