I thought the point of a trigger warning was to enable people with PTSD or anxiety disorders to leave the room or avoid the material rather than sit though it and feel worse.

"“the point is not to enable—let alone encourage—students to skip these readings or our subsequent class discussion (both of which are mandatory in my courses, absent a formal exemption). Rather, it is to allow those who are sensitive to these subjects to prepare themselves for reading about them, and better manage their reactions.” "

I feel that this professor has completely reversed the material benefit of it. If you say this could cause you severe anxiety but I'm going to make you sit though it anyway what was the point? It doesn't surprise me that if you trap the audience and warn them it will make them feel worse.

As someone who dealt with some severe PTSD issues at a young age, I think trigger warnings are counterproductive. You don't get over PTSD triggers by avoiding them, you get past them with therapy and exposure. You have to retrain your brain to react differently to similar stimuli. Trigger warnings simply encourage people to continue living in hell.

I think flashbacks and anxiety attacks are counterproductive to getting past it. Being unable to leave a situation, or with people who clearly don't give a shit about your well-being, can even cause fresh trauma. The warnings let someone make the decision to "expose" themselves to a situation or not, they don't make someone skip every time.

Having some clinical experience with PTSD treatment: you are almost entirely wrong.

Having also some clinical experience with PTSD treatment: I found the GP's statement to be closer to my experience.

The first thing you do in trauma focused therapy is establish safety, then build up tolerance and recovery techniques. You're going to have to give some more information as to what you mean.

Ok thanks

I certainly buy that exposure is important in treating PTSD, but that seems like a decision the patient and their doctor should be able to make. If I'm a teacher, for a student, I feel like I'd rather let a student make the decision about whether they want that exposure or not. It's not my job to decide what's good for their PSTD and how to treat it. If their doctor tells them they should seek out exposure, they can make that decision for themselves.

What about for teachers like the author, who teach legal classes? What happens to coursework about murder, rape, divorce etc? Does every topic that is potentially triggering become optional? What can be tested?

If I'm the teacher, I'd say everyone is responsible for all of the material. A warning is not an exemption, if a student feels (correctly or not) that avoiding material is necessary to protect their mental well-being, it might come at the expense of their grade.

I don't understand how you can say that trigger warnings somehow make people avoid getting treatment - how does that make sense?

Therapy and exposure are both helpful, but not all exposure is theraputic. If someone is actively treating their trauma, containment and building up a sense of safety is one of the first steps. We don't treat soldiers with shell shock by sending them back to combat zones, nor by repeated showings of violent war movies that aren't intended for therapeutic use, and not in a theraputic context. That isn't to say that any exposure to a concept is inherently negative, its surely one of the better treatment methodologies that has evidence behind it. But the context in which things comes up does matter. Its the difference between someone making progress towards healing and going into a negative coping mechanism spiral.

> I don't understand how you can say that trigger warnings somehow make people avoid getting treatment - how does that make sense?

Lots of people use trigger warnings to avoid topics entirely, and yell at people who don't use them with anything even remotely related to the topic. They demand everyone elsee change rather than treating their own disease.

The research on this is pretty clear: Exposure is important for treatment—but it has to be exposure in a safe setting, where the patient has both consented and prepared for it, and knows they can stop it at any time.

Most public settings—such as a classroom—where a trigger warning might be relevant do not meet these criteria.

I don't have PTSD so I don't really get much benefit from these things. I once knew someone that had OCD and they told me that that's exactly what you do in cognitive behavioral therapy. To be honest, I don't really know if trigger warnings help people or not but some people seem to like them. I figure that if someone has a really severe problem, they might want to do the exposure in a controlled environment rather than try to cope in front of a class though until they can moderate it better.

This is what I learned and has helped me slowly recover over the years.

There’s some importance in being exposed when you’re (somewhat) prepared for it - otherwise it can etch the natural reaction deeper.

Wow, that's a remarkably insensitive take coming from someone who's experienced an anxiety disorder. All you needed to do was remember that not everybody gets to have therapy. You didn't even need to accept that not everybody "gets past" trauma.

Everyone can have therapy, it doesn't have to be with a paid professional therapist. And I don't think people in situations without access to healthcare are worried about trigger warnings.

Correct.

The problem nowadays is that most therapists simply don't want their patients to get better.

Once you help someone recover, the revenue ends, not just for you, but also for purveyors of fine psychiatric medications.

It's never stated that succinctly, of course, but that is absolutely the result. It takes real work to find mental health professionals that actually want to heal their patients.

I'm sorry if that's been your experience, but it seems like you don't know many therapists if that's your read.

Its like saying firefighters don't want to put out fires so they'll keep being paid.

> Its like saying firefighters don't want to put out fires so they'll keep being paid.

Burning houses don't yield endless revenue streams for fire departments.

Yeah the initial goal of them in online spaces was "this contains this type of thing" where the thing was something likely to be triggering or painful for people with PTSD or other similar trauma responses.

Their use in places you're still required to interact with the potentially triggering material is well beyond their original goal which was basically as a filter for stuff you could avoid entirely.

I don't have any psychiatric education, but from what I've read written by actual psychiatrists, avoiding any mentions of traumatic experience or anything that could remind of it, forever - is not considered the best way to handle the problem. Of course, there could be people that are so severely affected that any mention of the subject is intolerable to them - but I feel like for most people "trigger warnings" rather function as establishing the norm - that some things should "trigger" them and if they don't maybe there's something wrong with them. If this is the case, I can see how it could be counter-productive.

What a tiring argument. The point of trigger warnings is that they allow you to not engage with content you don't feel comfortable engaging with. If you warn someone about a trigger that applies to them, but then make them read that content anyway, then you've just shown that you can make someone suffer by warning them before forcing them to endure something uncomfortable.

> among people who said they believe that words can cause harm, those who received trigger warnings reported greater anxiety in response to disturbing literary passages than those who did not

A valid interpretation of this result is that people who think words can cause harm are correct with regards to their personal experiences. In other news, people who say they're allergic to peanuts on average have a worse reaction to being forced to eat peanuts.

>The point of trigger warnings is that they allow you to not engage with content you don't feel comfortable engaging with.

Unfortunately the world is filled with things that we are all uncomfortable with. Teaching young people that they can simply close their eyes and plug their ears as a way of dealing with a word or an idea that they aren't comfortable with is the opposite of what we should be doing in schools, let alone colleges.

If this were about, say, the color yellow, or a political ideology (even a reprehensible one), I would 100% agree with you. I see where you're coming from - we all want our peers to be resilient in the face of difficulty. I don't think that schools are hindering this goal by using trigger warnings.

Gah, I'm sorry. I tried to write about some of my own difficulties that trigger warnings help me with, but couldn't get it to come out right. The point I was trying to make was that e.g. forcing a sexual assault survivor to watch a film depicting rape, with no warning, seems needlessly cruel.

> The results of around a dozen psychological studies, published between 2018 and 2021, are remarkably consistent, and they differ from conventional wisdom: they find that trigger warnings do not seem to lessen negative reactions to disturbing material in students, trauma survivors, or those diagnosed with P.T.S.D. Indeed, some studies suggest that the opposite may be true. The first one, conducted at Harvard by Benjamin Bellet, a Ph.D. candidate, Payton Jones, who completed his Ph.D. in 2021, and Richard McNally, a psychology professor and the author of “Remembering Trauma,” found that, among people who said they believe that words can cause harm, those who received trigger warnings reported greater anxiety in response to disturbing literary passages than those who did not. (The study found that, among those who do not strongly believe words can cause harm, trigger warnings did not significantly increase anxiety.) Most of the flurry of studies that followed found that trigger warnings had no meaningful effect, but two of them found that individuals who received trigger warnings experienced more distress than those who did not. Yet another study suggested that trigger warnings may prolong the distress of negative memories. A large study by Jones, Bellet, and McNally found that trigger warnings reinforced the belief on the part of trauma survivors that trauma was central (rather than incidental or peripheral) to their identity. The reason that effect may be concerning is that trauma researchers have previously established that a belief that trauma is central to one’s identity predicts more severe P.T.S.D.; Bellet called this “one of the most well documented relationships in traumatology.” The perverse consequence of trigger warnings, then, may be to harm the people they are intended to protect.

Slightly OT re trigger warnings, but Richard McNally is on one particular side of a very active debate within trauma-focused psychology, especially around memory repression. "Remembering Trauma" makes some very large conclusions that are by no means accepted widely. Not that he's a demagogue, but I think there's not really a full accepted understanding of how memory works or doesn't work on traumatized people's brains.

A large segment of clinicians absolutely do work off the idea that memories are repressed, though not in the "amnesia" sense, but rather more as something pushed deep down, or instinctively avoided and less accessible.

> The perverse consequence of trigger warnings, then, may be to harm the people they are intended to protect.

Personal opinion as someone who's dealt with trauma - a trigger warning reminds me of trauma in general, but its absolutely better than entering into say a piece of fiction with a prominent traumatic scene I'd identify with, with no warning. One can make me feel slightly worse, one can put me in a full on flashback.

OTOH, there's not really a reasonable line that's been developed yet as to what deserves TWs and what doesn't, in which contexts. If you allow for it in all situations where someone could possibly benefit from it then you're not really free to do very much. In the context of say a trauma forum though it makes much more sense to try to tag as much as you can.

Finally this stuff isn't new. We have the MPAA making ratings explicitly around movies about the themes involved. Broadcast media isn't allowed to curse because a lot of the audience can't handle it. TV News has said "Warning, this may be tough to watch" for decades.

I always thought that the warning lets one walk away before they get triggered. Of course, this would not be possible in every situation, but if I am watching news and see a warning for e.g., I can stop watching.

Edit: there are many other comments which showed up just this minute which say the same thing. Hence, I just repeated what others seem to concur with too.

Good, let's stop using them and go back to talking about bad things like adults who have a reasonable grip on their feelings.

It 100% isn't adult behavior to talk about a subject that triggers someone if you know it may trigger them.

For example, functional adults don't discuss topics like rape unless they are reasonably certain that discussion participants do not have an associated traumatic experience.

The purpose of trigger warnings is to let people excuse themselves if you do not have that familiarity or certainty with your audience, e.g. a classroom setting.

I'd argue that not using trigger warnings for such topics with unfamiliar people is immature and callous.

> It 100% isn't adult behavior to talk about a subject that triggers someone if you know it may trigger them.

The problem is that we have an epidemic of people who are triggered by normal words and even the mention of important topics -- like rape, murder, wars, etc -- that ordinary people do need to talk about, so when your sensitivity expands so much as to infringe on the ability of healthy adults to discuss the issues of their day, that's when it's no longer the case that adults can avoid discussing any topic that might upset the fragile minority.

> it's no longer the case that adults can avoid discussing any topic that might upset the fragile minority.

Isn't that the point of a warning? You're still going to discuss it, just with a warning up front. If you were going to avoid discussing it, you wouldn't need a warning.

So perhaps there is a misunderstanding here, but I think the point is that the warnings don't actually work, so if there really is something relevant that needs to be said, I'm not sure what the value add is of having the warnings. It's not like these are dirty jokes, where common sense says that those things don't need to be included in the lecture.

What we are talking about (supposedly) is content that is necessary to be in the lecture. It's necessary for the students to learn it. So do the trigger warnings help or not?

A good example here -- since this often comes up in the context of Universities -- is rape, and specifically rape law[1]. You have a situation where university professors are afraid of covering rape law because it might terrify their law students[2]. From the New Yorker article written by Harvard Law Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen:

"Student organizations representing women’s interests now routinely advise students that they should not feel pressured to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence, and which might therefore be traumatic. These organizations also ask criminal-law teachers to warn their classes that the rape-law unit might “trigger” traumatic memories. Individual students often ask teachers not to include the law of rape on exams for fear that the material would cause them to perform less well. One teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word “violate” in class—as in “Does this conduct violate the law?”—because the word was triggering. Some students have even suggested that rape law should not be taught because of its potential to cause distress."

So when talking about this issue of "being sensitive" it matters a great deal whether the request is a reasonable one to remove unnecessary material or whether the request is unreasonable. It's not just a question of being considerate without taking into account the reasonableness of the request.

Now there is nothing wrong with being upset at things -- I don't like the sight of blood. But I would never try to be a surgeon, nor would I complain in medical school that the sight of blood traumatized me. Someone with a fear of heights can't go to Pilot school. If I went to medical school, it would be my responsibility to know what I was getting into, just as someone going to law school is responsible for knowing what they are getting into. Otherwise, don't enroll.

This reminds me of the beautiful Rumpole novels by Sir John Mortimer, where the main character is employed as a defense attorney but all his partners are bothered by so many criminals visiting their offices. I mean, there is a line between "please don't joke about polish people" to "please don't mention rape in this law school", and the pro-trigger-warning movement has crossed this line. They cannot reasonably expect to be shielded from these topics in lectures, this material will be on the tests and they need to learn it, and the secondary backup attempt of giving them "trigger warnings" to psychologically prepare them for the trauma has been shown to not work.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/12/17/harvard-law-p...

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trouble-teaching-ra...

I'll be honest, most of your arguments are well thought out and written, but to me the target feels like, and I mean no disrespect, a strawman. I think you're conjuring, via a few cultural critics, the idea of a great mass "pro-trigger-warning movement" which either doesn't exist as a movement, or if it exists has a more reasonable and empathetic argument than you're making it out to have.

OF COURSE someone who wants to be a surgeon shouldn't be if they can't handle the sight of blood. Nobody is arguing otherwise.

To use Jeannie Suk Gerson's conclusion as a stand-in for your argument:

> Instead, though, many students and teachers appear to be absorbing a cultural signal that real and challenging discussion of sexual misconduct is too risky to undertake—and that the risk is of a traumatic injury analogous to sexual assault itself

That is one (relatively qualified) person's opinion, and I don't think she polled the students and teachers regarding the subject before writing this. I would remind that she is a professor of law, not of psychology. She may be misunderstanding the situation. She certainly writes extremely often about the problem despite being a law professor. At best, its a hearsay criticism and take it as you will.

Critically, a trigger warning is specifically NOT "please don't mention rape in this law school". If you weren't going to mention it, you wouldn't have a warning, would you?

Even if it's true that trigger warnings do not help people who go on to read the material, and even if it's true that reading the material is generally a good way to manage one's PTSD, I still think the students should be able to make their own informed decision about what they want to do. If they would rather avoid upsetting material, that's a decision they should be able to make. The only one they might be hurting is themselves.

Life should not be a walled garden where we can control what topics come up. Life is beautiful because it is unpredictable, and I dare say painful at times.

I understand your sentiment, but certain situations can be quite difficult when you’re at the mercy of your own brain. Anxiety, chemical imbalances, and traumatic experiences can etch deep pathways into the mind.

From what I've seen, they're mainly associated with one side of the political spectrum. The other side never did use them.

There are plenty of signs like "a combat veteran lives here, please be courteous with fireworks."

Are there veterans in classrooms saying they can’t read books about war though? I don’t know how common this is but I suspect the original comment might have a point that one side of the spectrum has elevated victim status into a source of power/authority.

You apparently don’t know many combat veterans if you think they predominantly sit on only one side of the political spectrum.

Right, that was the point of my post.

The huge surprise to me is that I always thought the point of the warnings was to give readers the opportunity to simply not read the material, not to somehow lessen negative effects when they do read the material.

In an academic setting its more for the latter, for say social media its more the former. Definitely depends on the context.

I find it interesting there can both be a stereotype of people who enter the field of psychology because they've had something to deal with themselves, and also an idea that those same students are somehow weak or not tough enough for wanting trigger warnings. If you zoom out I think its better to have TWs, when not overapplied.

Right, but this is saying trigger warnings re-victimize the party by placing the event on a pedestal and assuming fragility.

My daughter got stung by a bee on her eye. For quite a while, she didn't want to go outside if there was any bee, anywhere, which there usually is. I could decide that for the rest of her life, bees are triggering, and help her avoid them and lead her with my expectation that as a bee-victim, she of course would never want to leave the house again. Or I could do what I did, and not make a big deal of bees and not warn her every summer day that she might not want to go outside because there's a bee in the yard.

I fully acknowledge that there are things far far worse than bees, however I think the same principles apply. If you look at therapeutic psychological treatment for phobias--the treatment is exposure, and desensitization, not avoidance and magnification. Is it fair to assume victims want to wear a scarlet V? Or to promote the implicit message that avoidance is the correct response to trauma?

If you are in a class or a lecture, you can't just skip over parts of the material without hurting your understanding.

OK, I will accept that premise, from which it follows that if the whole class skips over these parts of the material, then everyone's understanding is hurt - so what are you going to do? It seems the choices are either that we accept that certain people should avoid certain topics (which is not a controversial position when the topic is, say, mathematics) or that all potentially-disturbing topics are off-limits (at least mathematics will probably survive in that case.)

That’s correct, but you can decide to skip over parts because you value your emotional well-being more than your understanding of a subject.

As an individual, you could try plugging your ears I guess, but it would certainly be disruptive to have half the class file out of the lecture, wait for some kind of signal, and then file back in.

Trigger warnings are ridiculed by many because they direct attention to the reaction people could have, and can lead to imagining people avoiding speech that merely makes them uncomfortable, or contradicts their world view, etc.

We already have movie ratings which dispassionately encode the content without jumping ahead to the idea of how people may react to it. I feel like a content-oriented labeling system that dispassionately summarizes potentially volatile concepts in a work would be useful for many use cases including those with PTSD would be a much more useful concept. It would, however, be less useful as a tool to create political division, so perhaps that is why it is not used.

'Content warning: the word "trigger" is used.'

I don't really believe there is anything that won't be politicized nowadays, especially if it doesn't fit with what people's memories tell them was the "good way that things used to be".

I agree with this as far as it goes, but I see a reasonable number of trigger warnings in the wild, and the vast majority are exactly the kind of content-oriented labels you're envisioning. This is one of those issues where crazy edge cases capture 100% of the press coverage.

My FB generally give "content warnings" - describe any intense or disturbing content a post might have.

I didn’t know anyone took trigger warnings seriously.

I’m glad I don’t hang out with anyone who does.

Trigger warning:

The world is a harsh place by default. Thomas Hobbes said it best when he called life “nasty, brutish, and short”.

The first noble truth of Buddhism is “Life is suffering”.

The solution is to try to make things better, not to deny reality and act like a two-year old rocking back and forth telling yourself everything is hunky dory.

There is always the approach of maturing people to the point that they can bear the uglinesses of reality and flawed human beings.

How tiresome that all the posters think "trigger warning" should continue to be a thing. Haven't you figured out yet that it was, and continues to be, a dumb idea?

Life is harder for some than for others. Trying to be extra kind to the people for whom it's harder is simply infantilizing for everyone.

I don't think you understand what trigger warnings are.

Really? How can you tell? What don't I understand?

GP was replying to another comment, not yours.