Should we bring the dead back to life?

When it Black mirror The episode “Be Right Back” was broadcast in 2013, it was clearly a science fiction work: tormented by sorrow after the death of her husband, a woman named Martha orders a robotic replica which serves as a real replacement, imitating her models of discourse and her ways.

But as with a large part of science fiction, reality is often caught up. Over the past decade, “avatars deepfake” and Deepfake have become commonplace, allowing bereaved people to chat with simulations of their loved ones. Now researchers explore something closer to Black mirror Concept: virtual reality technology that revives not only the image, voice or the way of the deceased, but a virtual simulation of their physical self.

Unlike most existing mourning robots, virtual reality creates the illusion of presence. Thus, even when someone consciously understands that the virtual environment around him is artificial, he often reacts as if he were real. “If we play a VR game and suddenly give you a ball, you will try to avoid the ball even if you know that it is not real,” explains Silvia Pizzoli, a researcher who studies sorrow and virtual reality at Pegaso University in Italy.

It is his strength and weakness. Virtual reality has been successfully used to treat mental health problems such as SSPT and anxiety by exposing patients to triggers or dreaded situations in a safe and simulated environment. Now, some researchers believe that technology could also help treat prolonged mourning disorders, a diagnosis that has been applied to people whose grief interferes severely with their daily operation for at least one year. A type of therapy for this type of sorrow aims to help the person develop a healthier link with the beloved absent inside his imagination. Clinicians often try an “empty flesh technique”, where patients have a conversation with the deceased while imagining them sitting in an empty chair.

How much should foreigners really interfere with the mourning process?

But the technique of empty presidents can be difficult to practice because people suffering from prolonged mourning problems often experience intense avoidance of the memory of the deceased, explains Francesco Fanta Rovetta, co-author of a recent article on VR mourning technology. Inspired by a large number of research on mourning, the Rovetta article proposes that virtual reality could improve existing mourning therapies by bypassing this resistance, requiring less imagination of the patient. But Rovetta and his colleagues also warn that technology should be used with care and only in supervised clinical contexts. Someone in the grip of a deep sorrow may attach to a realistic avatar of a loved one who left, which could lead to the illusion that the person is still alive.

Rovetta compares it to another type of imaginary relationship: children’s links with imaginary friends. “As long as the child knows that the imaginary companion is imaginary, it is almost adaptive,” he says. “When the child begins to believe that the imaginary companion is really real, then he can turn into unsuitable behavior.”

Likewise, a bereaved person must remain aware that the person in front of them is a simulation – something that the illusion of presence can make it difficult to achieve. In combination, these two effects can lead the bereaved person to develop an “ambiguous attitude” towards death. The person is aware that death has occurred at a cognitive level but always has an overwhelming impulse to deny it.

“One of the main risks I see is that potential use targets individuals who are already suffering from serious psychological and existential pain,” explains Pizzoli. Could VR therapy worsen the pain of this already vulnerable population? It is something that she plans to study in the future. “If we give these people the opportunity to meet again [with] The beloved, “she explains,” maybe we bother the natural and painful process of sorrow. “”

This is the question at the center of all this: how much should foreigners really interfere with the mourning process? Everyone cries a little differently. Some experts believe that prolonged sorrow is not at all a disorder, but rather medicine of a normal and inevitable form of suffering.

THE Black mirror The episode “Be Right Back” warned of such dangers: at the end of the episode, Martha, disturbed by the inconsistencies between the replacement of the robot and the husband she remembers, orders her replica to jump from a cliff, finally realizing that keeping it around will only highlight the gap left by her husband without ever succeeding in filling him.

More than Nautilus On sorrow and virtual ghosts:

“”Why I couldn’t overcome my brother’s death“Everyone told me that my sorrow would give in in a year. It only got worse. Was there something that is not going with me?

“”The ghost writerIn a work of fiction, holograms and memory collide.

“”Can you die of a broken heart?“What happens to our body when the bonds of love are raped.

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Image of lead: Alena Ivochkina / Shutterstock

• Zoe Cunniffe

  Published on October 1, 2025

  Zoe Cunniffe is a health writer interested in chronic disease and medical anthropology. His work has already been published in the Ethics Press collection Institutionalized madness: the interaction of the institutions of psychiatry and society. She also writes a sub-dos newsletter, reality tunnels.