Is fascination with torture and genocide unhealty?

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I'm kind of fascinated with and addicted to learning more information about disturbing things like torture and genocide. I know a lot about the Nazis, Soviet Russia, the Pol Pot Regime, casualties of the Vietnam War, the Spanish conquests of the Americas, the Spanish Inquisition, the French Revolution, the African slave trade, medieval torture methods, human trafficking, domestic and animal abuse, terrible diseases and conditions, etc. A lot of it is very disturbing to me but I'm addicted to learning more about it. I'm particularly fascinated with the Holocaust and Nazi human experimentation. I tried to have a conversation with someone one time to see if he knew anything about Nazi human experimentation that I didn't know, but all he said was that they did some really terrible things and he didn't want to talk about it. I'm also kind of addicted to gory movies and I've seen most of the Saw movies. I guess my fascination with disburbing things began when I first became a Christian who was learning about the Bible. I became disturbed when I read about the horrors which many people were facing and would have to face in Hell, the genocide in the Old Testament, and the horrors of the future apocalypse in which one third of the earth would be burned off. I became bipolar, paranoid, and in despair. After I became a Spiritualist a few years later, my Bipolar Disorder was replaced by a less severe condition known as Cyclothymia and I became less paranoid. I'm still fascinated with and addicted to disturbing things. All of the bad things that have happened in the past and all of the bad things that are still happening make me sad and scare me, yet I still want to know more. I'm only 18 and I know more disturbing things than most people. I would go to see a therapist, but I'm afraid of opening myself up to someone and I always manage to deal with my problems on my own anyways. I also don't really want to take any medication. I don't think about the disburbing things that I know all the time, but I think they're always influencing my subconscience. I don't want my subconscience to be changed by medical means. It's painful to know about so many disturbing things, but I would rather know about them than be ignorant of them.

Naw, your fine.

I wouldn't say it's unhealthy if it isn't interfering with your life, but if it's really bothering you and affecting you more negatively than positively, you should get help with it.

I remember reading an account of a boy with ASD whose much beloved grandfather died suddenly of a heart attack. The boy became fascinated with heart attacks and learning all about them - it was his new special interest. He was in effect calming his fears of other people dying and dealing with his grief for his grandfather by gathering as much information as possible about the cause of his grandfather's loss: knowledge is power and control over the unpredictable things of life. Gathering knowledge is a way of facing fears and dispelling uncertainty, it is an Aspie way of dealing with deep emotions and the seeming chaos of real life.

I suspect that many historians who work in areas like the Holocaust are probably fascinated by it. But they have found a way to use this fascination as a tool to help prevent it happening again. In a similar way, many morticians are probably fascinated by dead bodies, but this doesn't mean that they want to kill people; in fact, they may even help prevent people from dying! So, I would say that there is nothing wrong with this fascination in itself.