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[timotheos]

So in my last fort I managed to really upset one dwarf. She was part of the clean up crew for a siege and after seeing 30 odd goblin corpses and she flipped out. Except she wouldn't go that final step and actually die. She would cancel her job, "Urist McCarpenter is depressed", wander around the lower fortress levels for a while and then go back to work. The cancellation spam got annoying so I removed all her labours and let her sit in the legendary dinning room all day hoping it would make her feel better.
Two years later and I retired that fort and moved on to the next one. Guess who turned up in the third migrant wave. Except now she is a real liability. The job cancellation is still there but now, instead of moping around an unused corner of the fort, she is starting fights in the dinning room. Half a dozen knocked over tables and chairs was bad enough but she has just killed my legendary smith.
She is described as "Haggard from the stresses of life". Her stress is over 30K according to therapist and doesn't seem to be going down. I think it might even be the same as when I first spotted her depression in the old fort.
I've locked her in a room on her own and plan on letting her starve, unless someone can think of a better way of getting rid of her. Or a way of making her happy. My usual way of legendary dining rooms, personal bedrooms and masterful roasts didn't seem to work in the last fort. Although all the other clean up dwarves cheered up before I left.

[Tawa]

Insanity can't be cured. You'll have to starve her.

[mobucks]

a strong hammerer and a silver war hammer laying around should be good after a conviction.

[NJW2000]

Make her not care about anything by showing her more dead bodies. Make her a militia unit and send her to the mass graves for therapy.

[SyrusLD]

"Sunk into depression" isn't insanity yet. It is part of the way to insanity.
Insanity would be "stricken by melancholy" for someone who falls into depression one too many times.
"Haggard" (at least not "Harrowed" yet) is another part of the "journey" to insanity. It goes from "Stressed" (yellow) to "Haggard" (red) to "Harrowed" (purple). Dwarves (and other test subjects intelligent, stress-susceptible creatures) in those stages will "stumble around obvliviously", throw tantrums or "sink into depression". Watch out for those stressed dwarves, I had my absolutly willing test subjects stressed goblins and troglodytes destroy a retractable bridge and restraints under them on multiple occasions, and I strongly believe that dwarves MIGHT do the same. The circumstances how that happened are still unclear to me though, I think it might have to do with "throwing items around during a tantrum".
Anyway, going off course...

I find it quite weird that she is "Haggard" at only 30k stress. All tests I did had the subject only go haggard at 250k+. I had one subject turn insane before going harrowed though! You will notice when that happens, and the subject will eventually die (unless it doesn't need to sleep, eat, drink and is prevented from jumping off high places etc. - but it'd be a bit pointless and impossible without moding to keep an insane dwarf alive unless it might otherwise cause the whole fortress to go insane).

She should still be able to get better over time if you give her a nice room, good meals, alcohol...all the happy fun stuff. And lots of it.
I'd guess though, as you said the stress doesn't go down, that she is both highly susceptible to stress AND doesn't feel the slightest bit cheerful about anything and/or got other traits that make stress reduction difficult.
I had a few of the "never-happy"-dwarves in my fortresses, but luckily never a combination. They are hard to keep happy, it is always advisable to disable refuse hauling on dwarves like that.
Though I also had one of my carpenters increasing stress without it dropping much from all my great stuff I have around him - and he doesn't show any personality traits that explained why he'd end up with way more stress than any other dwarf. I turned off the refuse hauling which subsequently kept him away from seeing the bad stuff and which caused his stress to go down over time. (He didn't get to "stressed" though, I keep a close eye on my dwarves and thanks to all the high quality things I got around them - including proper rooms and platinum statues as well as artifacts and all - almost all are at -99999.)


If she is a real problem, there are of course lots of fun things one can do with annoying dwarves, be it velocity tests in a garbage dump shaft or finally getting that magma supply tunnel open which you misplanned somehow. Just remember to give her a grave/engrave a slab.

[Csponge]

Stress, that sucks... But how do you get your dwarves to dump goblin/elf corpses? I've just got around 50 corpses right next to my entry bridge and no dwarves will dump them on the hatch leading to the lava pits...

[NJW2000]

Probs DFHack autoforbid them for you?

[MobRules]

If you want to save the depressed dwarf, locking her in a room with food, booze, and nice furniture until she recovers can work (provided she hasn't "stricken by meloncholy" yet. (You can optionally make her bookeeper  & manager while she's there.) I've had luck with that, though sometimes it takes a while. By locking her in, you isolate her from most of the stressors that interfere with the recovery, while she still gets happy thoughts from the nice surroundings.

[Robsoie]

Looks like in df2014 you can't have dwarves anymore carrying your enemies corpses to other location in order to avoid necromancer spamming zombies from them, all you'll end with is a fortress full of horribly depressed dwarves, very likely because the stress system is broken and go overboard very fast and repeatedly with the same corpse/body part/tooth they can see :
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=7435

[NJW2000]

Isolate her with the bodies to inure her to death. That way, she will never get any more stressed.

[Larix]

^Exposing dwarfs to the sight of corpses just continually stresses them, they won't get used to it.

The only thing that appears to prevent corpse-vision unhappiness is "tragedy hardening" and as far as i can tell, the only thing that reliably does that in 0.40.24 is being involved in bona fide life-or-death combat, i.e. not just drafting her into the military and stationing her near the corpse pile - that will still just stress her out some more. You have to send her squad into combat against actual hostile units (goblins and undead definitely count, unsure about others; hunting doesn't seem to have an effect).

Getting corpses out of the way should be priority when cleaning up after battles - don't indiscriminately claim everything, or dwarfs will just collect clothes first and get super stressed over seeing corpses again and again. When corpses are moved out of sight (burned/buried/crushed) first, corpse stress stays limited. You'd still better remove refuse hauling/burial labours from stress-prone dwarfs.

"Haggard" is the mildest trouble that can trigger temporary insanity (depression/obliviousness/tantrums). It's curable, but that can be a tremendous nuisance, because in a normal fort, debilitating stress usually only occurs with dwarfs that "handle stress poorly" - start to flip at much lower stress ratings/are less responsive to happiness-inducing and stress-removing events. If tantrums are a possibility, you really should lock the dwarf up - tantrummers can destroy buildings they are near to (including bridges, chains and even traps) and fistfights can cause "minor" ("only" 1-5 dead) loyalty cascades.

[SyrusLD]

Corpse dumping ... it is diffcult, but not impossible. Have a garbage dump which puts the corpses out of sight of the dwarves (like an atom smasher a few levels down or a garbage dump shaft down to magma level) very close to where you (expect/intent) fighting to happen.
I have the options set to "gather refuse from outside (but not remains)", that way the dead intelligent beings are being removed from everywhere. Other death items are forbidden, that way I don't have to forbid them myself and the dwarves won't pick up all the armor and such. After the fight I then go around and mark ALL corpse (parts) for dumping. I then wait until the last corpse part is dumped before I unforbid (and mark for melting) all the other stuff that came with the siege.

Of course, even that way if you get lots of corpses your dwarves will go unhappy quickly. It is very important to stop those who are susceptible to stress from dumping refuse before they get too stressed. But even more important is to keep your dwarves around nice stuff. Like having a legendary dining room, with statues, high value tables and such. Give the dwarves some decent rooms. My dwarves for example have 4x1 rooms with a green glass portal, green glass table, green glass cabinet, a wooden chair and a bed. All walls are engraved by my perfectionist engravers. (Green glass is easy to produce if you got access to sand and magma glass furnaces and is more valuable than normal stone or wood. If you got lots of wood you can also go for clear glass, but that takes a lot of work-time due to the slow Ash>Potash>Pearlash-process!)
I also got lots of peasants and bone-/stone-/woodcrafters (children who had strange moods...I hate it) - they pretty much do nothing besides hauling, that way I got a good hauling force around.

Of course, if you got fewer dwarves it is much harder, since they get less downtime and more time they have to take care of the corpses. As already was stated, you could go and make them all "not care about anything anymore"...but that's a bit difficult.



From earlier experiences with smaller fortresses I noticed that the most difficult about .40's sieges are not the attackers themselves, but the stress their corpses produce. The stress can ruin a well running fortress even with a nigh invincible military! The most important thing is to remove all corpse parts of intelligent creatures as fast as possible. Watch out for trees, stuff tends to end up in the branches, unreachable for your dwarves, but still causing bad thoughts every time they come near.

[timotheos]

I've looked her again and I was wrong, it was 320K stress when she arrived but it has actually been going down as it was only 280K when I locked her in.
Therefore I relented and put food and drink in her room as well as a nice table, chair, bed and a couple of statues.
She is now also the reason none of my useful dwarves have refuse hauling enabled. Anyone else who gets like this will just be drafted and we'll see what happens.

[Rafatio]

My cheer up burrow includes the veggie seed stockpile and a special kitchen. They get the fancy room for breaks, but otherwise its nonstop work, these "satisfied" thoughts really add up nicely and if they need it for so long that masterworks start being made, even better feels on repeat. Can be any work really, as long as its in a controlled place and you have the supplies to keep them going for a long time.

[Iamblichos]

I would like to reiterate the point about trees.  When your enemies are killed, they seem to delight in flinging bits of themselves into the branches of trees, the roofs of buildings, into inaccessible holes, and (if they can manage it) hanging in midair.  All of these inaccessible bits cause repeated bad thoughts.  Check the area very closely, and try not to fight under tree canopy if you can help it.

If you must fight under the trees, make sure to check every z-level for bits... if there's a tooth 4 z-levels up in the top of an oak, your dwarves' psychic powers will tell them to be frightened every time they go near it, though there's no earthly way they could visually perceive it.