Ought to We Carry the Lifeless Back to Life?

When the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” aired in 2013, it was clearly a piece of science fiction: Tormented by grief after her husband’s demise, a lady named Martha orders a robotic duplicate that serves as his real-life substitute, mimicking his speech patterns and mannerisms.

But as with a lot of science fiction, actuality usually catches up. Over the previous decade “griefbots” and deepfake avatars have grow to be commonplace, permitting the bereaved to speak with simulations of their useless family members. Now, researchers are exploring one thing even nearer to the Black Mirror idea: Virtual actuality know-how that revives not solely the deceased’s picture, voice, or manner of conversing, however a digital simulation of their bodily selves.

Unlike most present grief bots, digital actuality creates the phantasm of presence. So even when somebody consciously understands that the digital setting round them is synthetic, they usually react to it as if it’s actual. “If we’re playing a game in VR, and I suddenly throw you a ball, you’re going to try to avoid the ball even if you know it’s not real,” explains Silvia Pizzoli, a researcher who research grief and VR on the Pegaso University in Italy.

This is its power and its weak point. Virtual actuality has been efficiently used to deal with psychological well being situations like PTSD and anxiety by exposing sufferers to triggers or feared conditions in a secure, simulated setting. Now some researchers imagine the know-how might additionally assist deal with extended grief dysfunction, a prognosis that has been utilized to people whose grief severely interferes with their every day functioning for at the very least a yr. One sort of remedy for this sort of grief goals to assist the individual develop a more healthy bond with the absent liked one inside their imaginations. Clinicians usually attempt an “empty-chair technique,” the place sufferers have a dialog with the deceased whereas imagining them sitting in an empty chair.

How a lot ought to outsiders actually intervene with the grieving course of?

But the empty-chair method will be troublesome to follow as a result of folks with extended grief dysfunction usually expertise intense avoidance of the deceased’s reminiscence, says Francesco Fanti Rovetta, co-author of a recent paper on VR grief know-how. Drawing from a big physique of grief analysis, Rovetta’s paper proposes that digital actuality might enhance present grief therapies by getting round this resistance, requiring much less of the affected person’s creativeness. But Rovetta and colleagues additionally warning that the know-how should be used fastidiously and solely in supervised medical contexts. Someone within the throes of profound grief dangers getting hooked up to a practical avatar of a liked one who’s gone, which might end result within the delusion that the individual remains to be alive.

Rovetta compares this to a different form of imaginal relationship: kids’s bonds with imaginary mates. “As long as the child knows the imaginary companion is imaginary, this is pretty much adaptive,” he says. “When the child starts believing that the imaginary companion is actually real, then it can turn into a maladaptive behavior.”

Similarly, a bereaved individual should stay conscious that the individual in entrance of them is a simulation—one thing the phantasm of presence could make troublesome to attain. In mixture, these two results could cause the bereaved individual to develop an “ambiguous attitude” towards the demise. The individual is conscious that the demise occurred at a cognitive stage however nonetheless has an overwhelming impulse to disclaim it.

“One of the major risks I see is that the potential use targets individuals who are already suffering from severe psychological and existential pain,” says Pizzoli. Could VR remedy worsen the ache of this already susceptible inhabitants? It’s one thing she plans to review sooner or later. “If we give these people the possibility to meet again [with] the beloved one,” she explains, “maybe we are disturbing the natural, painful process of grief.”

This is the query on the middle of all of it: How a lot ought to outsiders actually intervene with the grieving course of? Everyone grieves a little bit bit in another way. Some specialists imagine extended grief isn’t a dysfunction in any respect, however relatively the medicalization of a traditional and inevitable type of struggling.

The Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” warned of such risks: At the top of the episode, Martha, disturbed by the inconsistencies between the robotic substitute and the husband she remembers, orders his duplicate to leap off a cliff, lastly realizing that protecting him round will solely proceed to spotlight the hole left by her husband with out ever managing to fill it.

More from Nautilus about grief and digital ghosts:

“Why I Couldn’t Get Over My Brother’s Death” Everybody advised me my grief would relent in a yr. It solely bought worse. Was there one thing incorrect with me?

“The Ghostwriter” In a piece of fiction, holograms and reminiscence collide.

“Can You Die from a Broken Heart?” What occurs to our our bodies when the bonds of affection are breached.

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Lead picture: Alena Ivochkina / Shutterstock

• Zoe Cunniffe

  Posted on October 1, 2025

  Zoe Cunniffe is a well being author excited about continual sickness and medical anthropology. Her work has beforehand been printed within the Ethics Press assortment Institutionalized Madness: The Interplay of Psychiatry and Society’s Institutions. She additionally writes a Substack e-newsletter, Reality Tunnels.