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.