New research suggests that trigger warnings do not reduce negative reactions
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
"“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.
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.
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.
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.
Most public settings—such as a classroom—where a trigger warning might be relevant do not meet these criteria.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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’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.
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.