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It goes both ways. People constantly say they're triggered when they're just offended or inconvenienced.

If everyone followed your definition, we'd never had problems.

> People constantly say they're triggered when they're just offended or inconvenienced.

Do they? I only seem to see the latter online when people are being facetious about it. Do you see examples of people saying they were triggered and shouldn't have been and they are not referencing panic attacks?

Furthermore, we clearly have the ability to separate the cases where someone is saying "triggered" to mean offended or inconvenienced from meaning a panic/anxiety attack.

Exactly. I think a few agenda driven actors got a hold of the idea, and pushed forward their own version of what a trigger warning is for. I've heard a couple anectdotes about some student needing some ultra-sensitive care, but these are the outliers--if even true. Yet, this is all I hear about in online forums.

That said, I do hear some vitriolic defenses of them as well.

Moral of the story: Don't trust anything you read on the internet, I guess.

(Note: I support trigger warnings and think that they have a lot of use as a tool even outside of the typical context)

I'm in close contact with a lot of social justice groups, specifically ones based out of UC Berkeley. It's not super widespread, but there are absolutely individuals who abuse the concept of triggers as a way to give themselves pretext to be cruel to others, to control conversations, or just as something to get righteously indignified about.

This is an issue with the individuals involved and not triggers per se, but just as with other social technologies it's definitely possible to abuse triggers.

With the carnival ride analogy, you know a carnival ride has a physical strain that could cause problems to certain types of people, like pregnant women.

How are you supposed to know the set of topics that could potentially trigger a large classroom of people? And how are you supposed to know what topics will be brought up in discussions or questions asked in a classroom?

If someone is triggered by the topic of war or fire, it could come up as an analogy in any subject. "90s music was like a war on being happy - depressing alternative rock spread like wildfire."

Also, I think the burden of evidence is on requiring trigger warnings for classrooms. Why should they be implemented?

Completely agree with this. Trigger Warnings - good intentions or not, preventing panic attacks or not, are completely unreasonable from a practical standpoint. One cannot know in advance which information might or might not "trigger" someone. Not to mention, in a college setting, you can't just say "I refuse to attend this lecture because it triggered me.". Well if it causes you distress you can remove yourself from that environment.

You can't just know beforehand what might "trigger" someone, and you can't account for the majority of the cases. Add into it the fact that you cannot just avoid discussing uncomfortable topics because _some_ people might find it distressing -- sometimes discussing uncomfortable topics is the entire point, especially in academia, what else are you supposed to do?

Yes, panic attacks are horrible, but their causes are rarely as simple as the concept of "trigger warnings" implies.

It seems to be taken as a given that certain kinds of content are particularly likely to be triggers, but is that actually the case? What I've read suggests that actual causes are varied and unpredictable.

"One thing that bugs me is that people think trigger warnings are to make sure people don't get offended. Being triggered is not the same thing as being offended. Being triggered is about having a fucking panic attack, hyperventilating, feeling like you're having a heart attack and you're about to die."

If this is your normal behavior when a person mentions something undesirable, you need help and should probably get some professional counseling before enrolling in a university.

My problem is that we are catering to people with mental illnesses and making it difficult for anyone to accomplish anything without 'triggering' someone.

Life is tough, brutal, and ugly. It's doing a huge disservice to our youth to not give them the tools to properly cope with it.

Should they never travel abroad where trigger warnings and safe spaces will never be a thing? I traveled around Asia for 2 years when I was younger, and racism and bigotry are pretty normal occurrence.

It's also pretty apparent that it's now being used as a way to silence opposing viewpoints.

If I told you that gun control, atheists, and feminists trigger me, should any speech related to these on campus be banned?

I think one of the strangest things about the new generation is that unlike previous generations, they are actually fighting for more segregation, not less. Even the official BLM political site wants black-only establishments. You have groups that are self-segregating based on race and gender..yet scream for more diversity.

This is not my idea of diversity or freedom.

Universities used to be about the freedom of expression, thought, and open discussions. You can no longer have any kind of discussion if it veers away from the current narrative of the day.

Even if a meaningful percentage of the people clamoring for trigger warnings had a legitimate psychological condition like PTSD (which, based on my interactions with such people at a large university, they don't), making everyone else accommodate their emotional state is not a rational, mature approach. If you have a problem, seek to treat it; don't try to foist it on everyone else.

Whether it's a rational approach depends on how costly the change is to make, and how much it helps.

Banning people discussing certain topics in public throughout a university is obviously too costly. Adding a brief note at the start of an article/lecture/etc. saying you're going to be discussing something is perhaps not.

In Silver Linings Playbook, Bradley Cooper is triggered into a state of rage by his wedding song. This is due to it being a reminder of his wife's betrayal. Yet his psychiatrist purposely plays the song in his waiting room when Cooper comes in for a visit.