Powered by RedCircle
Episode Description
What happens when a forensic psychology grad spends 12 years calling families with the worst news of their lives?
Andrea McGinnis worked as a death investigator for a medical examiner’s office. She joins hosts Ashley Charbonneau and Morgen Villegas to talk about how her therapy training made her better at the job. That meant listening closely, asking hard questions without flinching, and sitting with someone’s grief over the phone, call after call.
They also get honest about seeing trauma firsthand, a stretch of child death cases that changed everything, and the toxic supervisor who pushed her out of a field she loved. Andrea’s take is blunt: “It’s the systems that are killing us.”
If you’re a grad student, a clinician rethinking your path, or curious about forensic psychology careers, this episode shows how far a mental health degree can reach.
Content warning: death, child and infant death, grief, and vicarious trauma.
GUEST BIO:
Andrea McGinnis has a Master of Arts in Forensic Psychology from the University of Denver and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Hood College. She spent 12 years as a medicolegal death investigator for the Medical Examiner’s Office, where she earned state and national certifications. She has presented on death investigation, sudden unexplained infant and child deaths, and victim advocacy. For the last two years, she has supported elementary students in an autism support classroom. Today, she is exploring new roles in education.
CHAPTERS
[0:00] Content Warning
[3:49] What Is Forensic Psychology?
[6:32] From Burnout to Death Investigation
[7:53] What a Death Investigator Does
[11:39] Therapy Skills in Death Investigation
[14:26] The Blank Slate and Sponge Approach
[16:41] Death Notifications and Burnout
[19:56] Vicarious Trauma and Victim Advocacy
[30:21] Child Death, Toxic Supervision, and Leaving the Field
Transcript
Content Warning
Morgen: Content warning: This episode includes discussions of death and death investigation, including the deaths of children and infants, descriptions of death scenes, grief, and vicarious trauma. It also includes discussion of workplace toxicity and burnout. Please take care while listening and step away if needed.
Introduction
Morgen: Okay. Welcome back to The Art of Being a Therapist: The Space Between Training and Real Life. I'm Morgen.
Ashley: And I'm Ashley. We are your co-hosts. So far, we've heard from several guests who have followed a more traditional path into the mental health field, moving from graduate training into agency work, and eventually into private practice.
While those journeys are incredibly valuable, one of the things we're passionate about on this podcast is highlighting the many ways people help. Today, we are excited to introduce Andrea, whose professional path does look different. Andrea earned her master's degree in forensic psychology. She started her career working with juveniles across school and home settings.
She worked for 12 years as a death investigator for the medical examiner's office, where she obtained state and national certifications and organization memberships. She's presented locally, statewide, and on the national level about death investigations, sudden unexplained infant deaths, and child death.
In this conversation, we'll explore how her training prepared or did not prepare her for this unique role, what it's like to work at the intersection of psychology, mental health, death investigation, and public service, and what she's learned throughout her career. So welcome, and we're just, again,
Morgen: glad that you're here, and let's just get into it.
What initially drew you to forensic psychology?
Andrea: I can remember being in seventh grade, and we were talking about in school what we wanted to be when we grew up, and I just knew I wanted to do psychology and I wanted to work in prisons. Now, this was, like, turn of the century. So we're talking, like, '99, 2000.
Forensic psych was not a big thing back then. It wasn't very common of a career path. In college was where I really started to learn about forensic psychology and started taking some of my credits in abnormal psychology. I did my first internship and- That was in the early 2000s, so it was a very different world, and this was in a residential facility, not court ordered.
It started as an alternative school, and they had the day school and the residential school. I worked evenings and weekends in the residential portion of the school. It was just a variety of kids that needed more supports than their schools were giving them, but the residential facility was also, their home life couldn't support them.
So that was, like, my first true real world experience with forensic psych. I was looking at grad schools and chose Denver because it was a more clinical path, and they really focused on internships and placements and getting experience while you were doing your education. And that's kinda how I ended up in Denver in a forensic psych program.
Morgen: I'm hoping that we can rewind a little bit for people like myself who don't know a lot about forensic psychology. What is it? I don't even have a great grasp on that.
What Is Forensic Psychology?
Andrea: Yeah. So forensic psychology, broken down in the simplest forms, is the intersection of law and psychology. So that can be contributed to courtrooms, law enforcement, psychiatric evaluations, court ordered evaluations, court ordered therapy, things like that.
Most people, I think, understand forensic psychology in two very broad categories. And when you say forensic psych, people think of TV shows like Criminal Minds or anything revolving the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, or they think of it in terms of court proceedings that make big news. So think Casey Anthony, Ted Bundy.
You have these cases where you bring in psychiatric evaluations to say, this person is competent to stand trial, not competent to stand trial. Oh, they're not guilty by reason of insanity. Those big court words, like the zeitgeist of that, where they throw out these words and people think, "Oh, forensic psych, that's what it is."
And it's so much more than that. But basically, the big field of it is working with offenders. So you're doing psychology, you're doing your normal therapeutic treatments, you're just doing them with a very specific population that is usually revolving around offenders and victims. There's really, I think, three primary paths for forensic psychology itself.
You have your clinical path, which is your people that are doing the treatment with the offenders and the victims. And then you have your non-clinical route, and those are a lot of people who are doing the evaluations. And there's also the investigative side, so there's things like forensic investigations.
Forensics and other umbrellas are, you now have your crime scene investigators, you have your computer analysis, so you're looking at computer crimes and the people who are looking at the forensics of that. You have financial forensics, so people who are literally just doing forensic auditing of how to catch fraud and things like that.
Ashley: So knowing that you chose a master's degree in forensic psychology, did you realize that death investigation would become your long-term career?
From Burnout to Death Investigation
Andrea: So I had no idea I was going to end up in death investigation. My internship in undergrad ended up falling into juvenile residential facilities, and I just ended up working in more and more restrictive placement facilities and higher behaviors with very little support.
They were environments that weren't prepared for interns and didn't know how to best utilize interns, and I burned out very quickly So I really wanted to go into a more non-clinical route. A friend of mine was doing an internship in the medical examiner's office with the investigations program, and I was like, "Yeah, sure."
And so I got the internship, and fairly quickly I fell in love with the job. It was just incredible how I just for the first time felt like I fit. Everything I was learning was a challenge, but the best type of challenge where you feel more confident at the end. And it was the best thing. There was a job opening at the perfect time.
I got it because I had proven myself as an intern, and I never looked back.
What a Death Investigator Does
Andrea: So as a death investigator, I think one thing that's really just needs to be stated is there is a huge push across the country to standardize death investigation because it currently isn't. They're trying, but it's not very standardized.
The job title itself is different names throughout the country, so you might be a coroner's investigator, a death investigator, a medicolegal i- death investigator, a forensics death investigator. There's all these different things that we get called, but basically we investigate deaths that are anything really.
So we investigate natural deaths, homicides, suicides, accidental deaths, traffic deaths, children deaths, anything like that. Our office would get called by state statute for any death that wasn't under the direct supervision of medical staff or that was non-natural. So let's say you're in the hospital for 10 days and you pass away, and it's completely natural, nothing to be concerned about.
You're not getting a call for that You were in the hospital for less than 24 hours, we're getting called. You're in the hospital for anything other than a natural, we're getting called. We would also go out to homes for natural deaths that aren't on hospice care, and anyone that has died under or without supervision by hospice or doctors.
I would say more than 75% of the cases we investigated were natural deaths. They just died under situations where no one was there, they were found late, maybe weren't found for weeks, days, months, whatever it might be, or just don't have family, and so no one really knows where to send them, what to do with them, who they are.
So that was a lot of the basis. And when we get called out to a death, we're working with law enforcement, we're making sure we know who this person is, so doing fingerprints. If they've unfortunately been deceased for a while and we can't do fingerprints, then we're gonna be doing head, CTs, any hardware you might have in your body, comparing those for scientific identification.
We're also looking for your family. And a lot of people don't know this, but there are literal state statutes that determine who is your legal next of kin and who has the legal authority to make arrangements for your body It's different than your state, y- your estate and your possessions. So we would follow those guidelines, make sure we have the correct people, and when we find them, we're notifying them.
So we're calling people, and this was a big thing. Our office, just by sheer volume of cases we had, we couldn't necessarily do in-person notifications on the regular. We strived for speed, getting someone to be notified as soon as possible, and so that usually resulted in phone call notifications. We would do in-person notifications when we could.
We were tracking people down across the country, internationally, getting people notified of loved one's deaths and how to handle their loved one's remains. So that's what I did. That was the basis of my job. Within that, I, for a time, supervised an internship program, and even when I wasn't running the internship program, I participated in training the interns.
I eventually became a lead investigator, so then I was supervising other investigators and doing training and onboarding, hiring processes.
Therapy Skills in Death Investigation
Andrea: It was everything I wanted. My background in therapy really made me a better investigator, especially when it comes to death. I went into a field that was basically comprised of former law enforcement, former lawyers, former police officers, sergeants, detectives, social workers, EMTs, doctors, nurses, CPS investigators.
This is what my world was comprised of all of a sudden, and I came in and just was able to teach people things, just basic things we were learning in grad school. I left the clinical world. I was not doing active therapy. But as I think about it, I, every single day, sat with people who are looking for their missing loved ones or have lost someone, and I'm sitting there, and I'm listening to them.
It wasn't just this, "Hey, they've died. Where do you want them to go?" Moving on. It's sitting there listening to their stories, just sitting with them in their grief, and I think that's where I now think I did much more parallel work, like I said. So I wasn't a therapist, but I traveled a long therapeutic road as I sit with people in their grief and talk to them through the process and listen to them as they're processing the death of a loved one.
And so while I wasn't a therapist- I think part of the reason I was so good at it was because I had that therapeutic background. I just had a different approach to the things I was doing, and so I could get a lot more information out of families, and people would be like, "Well, how did you find that out?"
Well, I listened. I knew how to ask questions, and I got that from my classes in therapeutic, how to run a therapy session, how to sit there, how to get answers without complicating it or upsetting people. And you know there are upsetting questions that have to be approached, and having that therapeutic background, especially in forensics where we're talking about harmful thoughts, suicidal thoughts, family dynamics, autoerotic behavior, substance use.
To be able to have that language, but also the demeanor where I'm not uncomfortable with it, and therefore there's no reason for you to be uncomfortable with it. I acknowledge it's taboo. I acknowledge these thoughts and your feelings. These are the information pieces we need to delve in so I can get you your answers.
The Blank Slate and Sponge Approach
Andrea: I think that's where the blank slate approach for me comes in, because if I put my own discomfort about anything into this, I'm not going to get the information I need to run my investigation, to get all of the answers, to provide that for the family. And it's hard to be relational when someone's going through grief and trauma.
So I think in a normal clinical therapeutic session, I 100% prescribe to the relational approach. But in my professional experience- It didn't work. People don't want me sitting there and talking about my own experience with grief and loss and trauma. They just want a sounding board. And so I was thinking it's not always necessarily the blank slate, but it's also a sponge approach, to be able to just let these families unload that grief on me, and that information and that processing, and me to just take it, and then to be able to remove myself, move on with my day, and have a way to release it, like to, to wring out all of that grief and trauma.
Ashley: It's interesting hearing you talk because it makes me wonder how many fields or roles that we don't consider to be mental health or social work roles could be better served by someone with a mental health background because of those rapport-building skills or active listening skills. You're a link in a chain, as a lot of us are who work in systems, and just the totally different approach from relational versus blank slate in that overarching field.
And I think people aren't really prepared for death, and so if you as the professional are the one prepared for death, like you are trying to create that space to have very difficult conversations very quickly, and potentially over the phone, which is hard.
Death Notifications and Burnout
Andrea: Um- Oh, it's so difficult. People dread it. Like, no one wants to call up a pizza place and order a pizza because they don't like talking to people on the phone.
But for me, it was completely different. I don't like talking on the phone because for 12 years, I spent every day calling people and telling them sometimes the worst news of their lives. Like, just imagining getting that call saying, "I'm, I'm sorry to tell you, this person was found deceased, and we're calling you to notify you of that death."
And the typical grief reaction that you would expect, crying, screaming, yelling, was more often the reaction than not. And to sit there and just then get the phone call done, hang up, and move on, and people say, "Okay, what are we doing for lunch?" Their life is forever changed. And now I'm stepping out and I've got interns saying, "Hey, I need help with this."
I've got coworkers saying, "Hey, you're my supervisor, I need help with this." I've got, my boss is coming to me saying, "Hey, where are we at on this project?" There's no time to sit in that and just say, "Wow, that sucked." We are a mental health field, and people don't necessarily see that. And I think that's part of the reason there is this big push in the field for mental health for first responders.
But in the field of death investigations, we're not technically first responders. We're not classified as such, and so there's a lot of burnout in the field. There's a lot of transitions. We don't have those parameters to help us walk through it. And so you get these people that don't have any history, active listening, how to sit there and take that information without letting it affect us And so what I see my colleagues doing is we have that mental health background, and we're good at it, and we can take that and sit with it, and allow ourselves to do our job and stay true to ourselves.
And there's people that don't, and they either burn out, and they're more or less traumatized by their experience, or they shut down entirely. So unhealthy in my mind.
Ashley: Yeah, and the brain is a powerful thing. We repress things and deny things and push things down- Mm-hmm ... because it's too difficult. And I appreciate you saying you're not a first responder 'cause you're not the first one on the scene.
A lot of us experience vicarious trauma because we hear about trauma, and we don't have the resources to cope with that, and that's of course related to burnout as you mentioned. But you are actually seeing the trauma. You are on death scenes. And I think that's a huge difference between what a lot of us more traditional therapists do.
Vicarious Trauma and Victim Advocacy
Ashley: We're hearing about something secondhand, maybe even thirdhand kinda depending on what the client is processing. But you're actually seeing firsthand.
Andrea: You worded it perfectly. It's one thing to hear them, it's another thing to see them. It's a full sensory experience because you're not just hearing it and seeing it, you're hearing the story but you're also hearing the humanity side of it with the screams and the cries and the wailing and just the, the whys.
You're also smelling things, and you're feeling things physically. I think my graduate program did a really good job on vicarious trauma and giving us entire classes on trauma and setting us up for that way to process that because I don't think I ever could've Made it without that. That was a really good foundation to have going into it, 'cause I would've been lost.
Morgen: Can you tell us what you would say when you called someone?
Andrea: My name is Andrea McGinnis. I'm an investigator with the city and county of blank. I'm looking for the family members of so and so. Do you know them? Can you confirm their date of birth? Unfortunately I have some news that might be upsetting to you.
So and so has been pronounced dead in the city today. And then we'd go on to circumstances.
Morgen: You would do that more than one time a day you said, for 12 years?
Andrea: Oh, yeah. There were some times that was just all we did. We would have a list of people, cases that we were still looking for next of kin, and you would just make those calls all day, phone call after phone call of looking for family members, maybe finding family members, maybe finding distant family members, and then having to call closer family members, just over and over again.
Morgen: Andrea, it just makes me really think that blank slate matters in terms of context, right?
Andrea: Absolutely does.
Morgen: It's so true. You wouldn't... This isn't a chance to create a kind of like contact or relationship with the person that you're calling. They're not technically your client, and they're not going to be.
But what I'm hearing, though, is inside of yourself it wasn't a blank slate, right? No. There was like a deep compassion and concerning care that you were holding for each person. I know it was a while ago that you probably last said that. Even as you're saying that, I can sense that. I was just curious about that, and I just wanted to name for our listeners what that process would mean on the outside versus the inside, and how we hold space versus- Absolutely
how we might be perceived with what we share. Like that are
Andrea: all... We trained our investigators to really hold that space. I never- Tried to rush them off the phone. There were some times I was on the phone with a family member for an hour, and my pager's going off and, like, I am needed elsewhere, and it's just, no, they need information.
They need to be heard. They just need someone. I can remember sitting there and being like, "Is there anyone else I can call for you? Are you alone right now? What can I do to help you? Can I send someone out there to you to where you are to sit with you? What can I do for you?" And I think it's mostly aligned with trauma counseling, like the people that go in for the crisis response counseling.
It very much is that. And I think funding at the federal level right now is really difficult. But when I left the field two years ago, there was- things were going really well, and our office had started a victim advocacy program because what was happening was our volume kept increasing, our numbers kept going.
We were having more and more deaths, which means more and more notifications, and our numbers of staff and personnel are not increasing. We have a limited amount of investigators, and we truly don't have the time. We have the compassion for our family members because they are the family members of our cases, and you felt bad because it, it is, "Hey, I'm really sorry.
I wanna sit with you in this, but I've got five other calls I need to make. I've got two more scenes I need to go to. I've got a hospital waiting on me right now. I can't hold up everything else." And that was a really lousy feeling. That just felt like shit. To sit there and say, "Hey, drop a bomb," and then peace out, I gotta go do my job, that is horrible.
And so what I really appreciated, our office started, and it's slowly making its way around the country, are these victim advocacy programs within the medical examiners offices and within the coroner's offices. Sometimes they're called bereavement counselors, but they're fully aligned with the coroner's office or the medical examiner's office, and they are our people that are much more social work and therapy-based and have those backgrounds, and they are doing those follow-up calls and saying, "Hey, what can we help you with?"
To have that hour-long conversation just to hear them out, to sit there and process, and what resources do they need? Because nobody knows what to do when someone dies, especially suddenly or young or suddenly and young. All these resources are out there, and people don't know about them, and the investigators sadly don't necessarily have that time for the relational response.
But it's needed. That relational building and rapport building is needed in the field, and it's just now getting to the point where people are saying, "Hey, maybe it's not okay to just disrupt lives like this. What can we do for these families? What can we do to help?" And it's not necessarily grief counseling that they're doing, but it is definitely much more of that victim advocacy approach within the field
Ashley: And maybe even like you said, time of, "I see you, I hear you, I can give you my time, I can give you my knowledge."
Andrea: And I realized about halfway through my career, if that's who I'm gonna be, like yeah, this is who I am. I do care about these people. I have that compassion and empathy, and yeah, I'm gonna do the small things, because they might be small to me, but I know in my heart these are huge things for these families.
And that was just always m- my approach, and I tried to instill that in my interns to be like, we're... Yes, we have to compartmentalize to be able to do this job and to do it well, but you're also a person and they're people, and they deserve our respect and our empathy and our compassion just like anyone else does.
Ashley: And I think you're saying too, just because something has always been done one way- Mm-hmm ... doesn't mean we can't bring in our own values, our own professional... Knowing that you chose a very niche specialty, forensics, what do you think good therapy is? Wherever you wanna start is fine.
Andrea: I have been in the death world, and I've been in the therapeutic world, and I'm in an educational role now, and- I find it really hard to find a therapist for myself because I've been in therapy with clinicians who I end up upsetting, and that is hard.
And I don't think a client should ever leave a therapy session feeling like they've traumatized their therapist. And that can be hard for someone who wants to come in to a setting where I feel like therapists should be a blank slate. I don't wanna know what they're doing. I don't wanna know necessarily their thoughts on their lives and their opinions.
I wanna know what it has to do for me. I feel like what makes good therapy is when the therapist can be more of a reflection and a meeting point than a, I don't even know how to really truly put that into words.
Ashley: What I'm gathering from this is
Morgen: it's not about the therapist.
Andrea: Yes.
Morgen: I think, Wendy, what you're getting at too is really supporting clients and coming to their own strengths-based perspective and tapping into their own wisdom and power rather than subverting that toward ourselves and sharing too much or essentially not holding a container that goes outward.
Andrea: Absolutely.
Ashley: Um- That brings me back to something that you shared earlier about your journey. You said, all of a sudden, "I fit." And to me, that exemplifies the sense of belonging, and I don't think it's talked about enough how hard it is to find your place in this field. It's taken me years, and Andrea, you've seen me reinvent myself and reinvent my reputation and reinvent my specialty and then leave that because I'm burnt out.
And it's very hard to get to a place where you're like, "I fit. I found my people."
Andrea: Yes, absolutely. And I, to this day, 100%, and I know many programs do this, I think the, the best requirement in grad school was that we had to participate in 10 sessions of our own therapy. And those 10 therapy sessions, I didn't really use to be like, "How do I do therapy?"
I was just like, "I need help. I don't know how to balance all of this." And I still use this to, when I start a new therapist now, I'm like, "Hey, here's the thing. I'm really good at juggling about three to four things in my life." But as soon as that fourth or fifth thing get thrown at me and I cannot incorporate it into my juggling routine anymore, and I need help.
Child Death, Toxic Supervision, and Leaving the Field
Andrea: And Ashley, you introduced me to EMDR, which was fantastic and truly changed the course of my career in where I started to get into kind of the child death investigation niche. And so what had happened was I, in my personal life, I had given birth, I'd had a baby. Right after I went back from my maternity leave, I had a three-year-old pass from adenovirus.
That is a straight up common cold, and I had an investigation where a three-year-old died from that, and I just powered through it. And then what do you know, three months later, I now have an eight-month-old who has adenovirus. And we end up in the ER, and I am panicked. And it's like we get over it, the baby gets better.
I think we're moving on, and then I end up The next month with an infant whose birthday was almost identical to mine. It was the first time I had ever cried leaving a scene. And then my ch- uh, right after, we had a month of just some of the most horrific child deaths I had ever encountered in my over a decade in that office.
It was truly just one right after the other for a three-week period. And Ashley, I remember talking to you so many times during this period and just being like, "I don't know if I can do this anymore."
Morgen: That sounds like so much that you had to go through at that time, Andrea. I'm wondering if you felt like you had good supervision.
Andrea: I ended up with a supervisor who was extremely toxic, was very harmful to who I was. And I can just remember I went from, I loved my job, I loved my office, to I would have to sit outside of my office on a daily basis in tears. And I just couldn't take it anymore because it was destroying what I loved.
That was really the final straw. I came home and I went to my husband and I just said, "I can't do this anymore." So I left with a 20-page documentation to HR detailing everything, just like all the crap and how detrimental it was. And HR took it seriously and a full investigation started. She was walked out of the premises on my last day in the office, and they interviewed everyone and she was let go in the end of it.
But it's hard because I knew that departure was very likely going to be a pretty steady departure from a field that I- Loved. I think that trauma work has a lot of where I wanna head. I think the world of death investigators need a lot more people who are in tune to therapeutic work, and I think that is a lot for a lot of our systems.
It's the systems that are killing us. It's the systems that we're all working in that are, I think, the number one reason for our burnout.
Morgen: And I think you did have a career shift that we didn't really get to talk about. If you wanna just name that briefly before we start to close, that would be really great.
Andrea: Yeah. We chose to move back to Pennsylvania where my family is, and in the process of, I got a job just kind of helping in an autistic support classroom, and working in that setting. And during that process where I was like, 'Okay, I'm gonna figure out what I wanna do with the rest of my life. Do I wanna go back into death investigation?
Do I wanna go back into therapy? What do I want?' I discovered I had a brain tumor, and spent the last year helping in a classroom and recovering from brain surgery. And now I'm in this portion where I'm figuring everything out again, and I really want to go back into using the educational aspects that I'm learning right now, and going and teaching others how to do these things, and to do 'em well.
I don't want the world of death investigators to just be a bunch of harsh-minded people who are like, "Oh, it's death. Get over it," or, "Oh, it's death. It's so traumatic. Let me help you," or in it for the gore. I really want people who wanna help people. I think therapists make some of the best death investigators because we know how to sit with things, and we know how to walk through that.
I think people who really can handle the job of death investigators end up for those very same characteristics as a therapist. So that's where I'm at, and I just wanna move forward and work on my presentations and getting out there, and teaching people what I know.
Morgen: I'm just so appreciative that you joined us today and shared that.
I'm so excited for the potential for future work. I'm just really grateful we had this opportunity to talk about these things, 'cause I feel like I have a much greater understanding of what you had to hold and what you still hold, right? And just the healing process. Appreciate it. It's just incredible, like the wisdom that you hold and the experiences that you've had.
Andrea: You both giving that space to let that conversation happen 'cause it's not... The normal conversation about death investigation is, "What's the grossest thing you've seen?" Not- All of the background for it. So I just love having that space to delve so much deeper. Thank
Morgen: you. Thank you. Thank you. One of the things we hope listeners take away from these conversations is that there's no single right way to build a meaningful career with a mental health degree.
Your path is such a powerful example of how our training can show up in unexpected places and make a profound impact on people's lives. Whether you are a graduate student trying to figure out your next step, a clinician wondering if traditional therapy is the right fit, or someone considering a career pivot, we hope today's conversation reminds you that there are many ways to serve, help, and make a difference.
Sometimes the most fulfilling path is the one you never saw coming. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a colleague or friend. It really helps others find the podcast. Thank you again for spending this time with us. Until next time, take care
