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[Urist9876]

A while ago a youtuber (GenJeft) posted his fortress on the DF download site with a link in this forum.

It happened to be an abandoned fortress with the corpses of several sieges laying scattered all over the place. Eventually the fortress was ran over and almost every dwarf killed before it got abandoned. They were also scattered all over the place. On top of that many coffins were empty with their previous contents scattered as well.

My first reclaim attempt went completely wrong. Dwarves got insane after seeing that many corpses.

My second attempt failed because many ghosts started to kill my starting seven, leaving the rest in such bad mental shape that I gave up again.

In my third attempt I immediately started to engrave slabs and took great care of filling every need I could. Then I started to notice something: the thoughts of the dwarves about past events started to change. First they were "horrified to see a goblin die"x 10. Later the messages changed to less extreme thoughts. Now, a couple of years after, some have the "didn't feel anything after seeing a goblin die"  thought.

A couple of versions back this was the way to go: induce so much horror they do not care anymore. Now it seems a version of this is still possible, if you counter the negative thoughts with loads and loads of good thoughts.

One of the reasons it might have worked out is the fortress was well established before succumbing to an invasions. All furniture was masterwork. It wasn't too hard to get a lot of positive thoughts.

Maybe related, maybe random, one of my dwarves got caught in a rain and started to love nature. While profanity to dwarven ethics, this treelover did not care about rain after anymore too. If it was not random, it might have had to do with the fortress being entirely lit in the inside because it was constructed in a huge dug hole. Dwarves had zero cave adaptation.

http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=14432 The great stoneware fort. This is a fun fortress to try stress related issues. Don't be alarmed if your computer freezes while loading the fortress. It takes a while to process the ten thousands of items littering around. After sending them of with a caravan or destroying them right away it becomes playable.

[Crabs]

I hate to be that guy but:

Check out this thread that's dedicated to the stress topic in 44.11+. There your findings are probably very well appreciated

[NordicNooob]

The only stress that reduces long term stress (via increasing the 'doesn't really care about anything any more' trait) is specifically from seeing sentients die. Not even sentient bodies will trigger it, their death has to be seen and watched.

All other stress is bad, and trauma/major bad events ('major' being poorly defined and including rain, drinking water without a well, and retching on miasma) can induce personality change that will typically be bad for the dwarf's stress resistance.

Memories can be abused with several powerful good thoughts every once in a while, the best example of which is having children or gaining siblings. These powerful thoughts will linger in memory, which is a nice little boost to their immediate mood, but the real reward is the likelihood for good personality change. Typically dwarves who get a personality change from kids will gain stress resistance, become more cheerful, become slower to anger, and several other traits that can significantly reduce the chance of them getting stressed out.

[Staalo]

Some dwarves just have personality traits that will slowly kill them with stress from simply existing.

I have had some success using shock therapy to treat chronically stressed dwarves. I assigned those dwarves to stress-inducing jobs (corpse hauling, all outdoor jobs, web collection) in hopes of a beneficial personality change which could give them negative net stress. Harsh, but those dwarves would have been goners anyway.

In one fort I even had a 50% success rate, where dwarves would gradually heal from stress after they experienced their shock therapy-induced personality change. That must have been a fluke, though.

[Urist9876]

Check out this thread that's dedicated to the stress topic in 44.11+

Things are looking quite good stress-wise currently. However I did not have a serious invasion yet. Will try and report how they fare after seeing actual sentients die.

The only stress that reduces long term stress (via increasing the 'doesn't really care about anything any more' trait)

See above, didn't get an invasion yet to test their personalities. But it seems the not care about anything trait is already invoked on several dwarves. They do not care about their meals or rooms anymore. So it might be enough to see a couple of hundred dwarven, elven and goblin corpses at once. Maybe it helped they were all dumped on the same tile. Shock therapy is best administered all at once and not a few at a time I guess:)

Several dwarves are in constant rage. That does not seem to have any effects right now. It might have long term effects.

[NordicNooob]

Constant rage definitely has effects. You can probably write those dwarves off as dead unless you're doing a wonderful job at sheltering them from everything.

Caring about meals and stuff is also not a great indicator of the 'does not care about anything' trait, since it can still happen with certain personalities anyway. Just like, check their personalities and see if they have it tacked onto the end.