When someone has been through a trauma we want to help that person recover. Their recovery is not helped by blanket avoidance of "triggers". Their recovery is helped by a cautious therapeutic programme of planned exposure, with support and follow up.

It's obvious that this is very different from how trigger warnings are currently being (ab)used. Trigger warnings are not being used to provide information to consumers so they can make an informed choice. Trigger warnings are being used to stop distribution.

Some law courses struggle to teach law around rape, because "triggering". Some sociology courses don't teach about suicide because "triggering".

The solution is to provide the warning, and to also teach the topic, and to make sure that the few people who need it have access to good quality support.

Do you have some source for the best way to help people recover from trauma? I have no idea how to do it, but I would be surprised if Dr. Phil style "throw them into the deep end until they get over it" is really the best way.

Hang on - nothing I said can be seen as "throw them in the deep end until they get over it"!

For people with mild symptoms you should do "watchful waiting" if the trauma happened less than 4 weeks ago.

Single episode "debriefing" after a traumatic incident should be avoided.

People should have access to early intervention trauma-focussed psychological therapy

https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg26

(Although this guidance is going to be re-written soon).

There is no blanket treatment for "trauma". One issue with patients is that often the will to fix things is missing, at which point nothing helps. Those people will argue, and in extremer cases even fight just to avoid getting exposed to the real world again.

First step is usually to index what the reactions are that make the trauma last. Those can go from violence, the will to fix it, over avoidance, to panic, and goes on quite a while. At an extremely high level you could perhaps say that you go over them, attempting to eliminate them one by one. But of course "fixing" panic reactions is done very differently (and much more carefully) from establishing the will to resolve the problem. Throwing in the deep end can work very well if the will to face the problem is the only problem. When we're talking about a situation that looks scary in movies but doesn't carry real risk (like non-venomous spiders) that will usually work, and in fact a lot of people will do just that without any help from a therapist. Best to verify beforehand though, as it certainly will make panic reactions worse. Panic is sometimes solved by role play, imagining, where possible, and planning out moves and counter moves before going anywhere near the real situation.

In a way a therapist only shares his own character with the patient. The theory is that this improves the patient, and the therapist is trained to experience minimal impact. It is advised though, that therapists pair up and have sessions with each other to verify that there is indeed only minimal impact, and fix if problems develop.

Throwing people in the deep end is usually unavoidable : people don't have the choice in the medium term, they have to face the real world, and therefore a good therapy should take that into account.

See this earlier comment, and the references cited therein, for information on how exposure, rather than avoidance, is better for treating trauma survivors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8801995

> Yes, people who were raped or abused or assaulted could have PTSD, and yes it does mean we're doing something VERY wrong to them.

Yeah, I would expect some of the worst possible things that could happen to someone would leave a mental mark on the victim. I think most people would. These aren't the people I'm talking about and you know that.

>> Life doesn't have warning labels

> Well, it could, right? Life didn't have a safety net until we created welfare and social security. Life didn't have training wheels until we created a robust schooling system.

The more you hold someone's hand through life, the less they are able to do for themselves as adults. Research is continuing to prove this out, how helicopter parenting is destroying kids emotional IQ. They don't know how to deal with life, mom does that for them.

Things like outlawing two hand touch football, dodgeball, even tag and king of the hill at school in order to keep kids safe are rendering them unable to navigate social constructs on their own. Free play allows kids to participate in rule making and enforcing on their own, generating their own social constructs, and dealing with the consequences all their own. Think about all the shouting matches of "I tagged you, your out!" and "No you didn't!". These are all ridiculously important to the development of kids and it's the thing schools at all levels are cutting the most. Recess and PE are essentially gone from schools. PE teachers have been axed and the regular teachers, with no interest in or time to study PE now teach the classes. If kids start playing tag, they're suspended for aggressive anti-social behavior. It's possibly the most social thing they could ever do at a young age.

The notion that everyone should be coddled so that no one may suffer is not only belittling to everyone in society, basically affirming you believe that no one is capable of handling their own affairs without help at every step, but it leads to a bunch of people with their brains half turned off and under developed.

You want Idiocracy to come true? Don't worry about Trump, keep up with the safe spaces and trigger warnings. Keep screaming at your kid's teacher until they get that A instead of a C-. Keep letting your kid think that the world should be smooth sailing and if it's not you should give up. Keep that up and we'll have it during my kids' generation.

Ok, I think you're picking really easy targets. Nobody else here is talking about banning tag or bullying teachers or something. These aren't the people I'm talking about and you know that.

Can we move on from this pretty limited discussion? Most other comments here have made it clear that not every use of "safe space" and "trigger warning" is legitimate, and we all agree with these layups you're taking.

The greater point I was alluding to is that we (at least the US) generally try REALLY HARD to do things to keep our kids happy and safe. Not because we want to lobotomize them, because we love them. I'm a dad, I feel it every day, every time my kids go up the stairs my spidey sense is waiting to jump at any moment and catch them. I understand the emotional reasoning behind all of the things we are trying at the younger ages.

The problem with all these things we're trying to do is that we have the unintended consequence of really keeping them childish in many ways, and it has become very telling when you look at the level of public discourse today. It starts when they're young and is proving to have detrimental effects that carry on into adulthood as more and more studies come out.

People are becoming unable to maintain a collegial dialogue, like you and I are doing at this very moment (thank you), the notion of ideas that disagree with your own become unfathomable, even traumatic, and then you're unable to see where someone else is coming from. You then can't meet in the middle, because you have to be right and they have to be wrong, and then we're stuck. You can't even, as the kids would say.

I truly believe that to have the hard discussions we need that people need to feel safe to speak their mind. For someone who's lived a persecuted life, they may never be able to do that unless they're in a place they believe is safe. If that means that on campuses different student centers are labeled as such, so be it. That's fine. If the entire campus, all buildings, and all rooms are labeled as such, then where are we going to have a discussion where we disagree? Because taken to the logical extreme that we're seeing, to be a safe place, we can't have a disagreement, it would be too unsettling.

College campuses should be the root of these hard discussions. These are the institutions we're sending our kids to in order to engage in higher thought.

> that everyone here would agree is dumb

Trigger warning: I don't agree. And I think your tone is a bit aggressive.

Yeah, this doesn't really seem like a big deal. If people don't want to engage with you, don't engage with them. It's not like you would have had a meaningful conversation if trigger warnings didn't exist, they still would have ignored whatever you said.