Should we pull the trigger
September 29, 2021 1:35 AM   Subscribe

What If Trigger Warnings Don’t Work? (SLNewYorker) New psychological research suggests that trigger warnings do not reduce negative reactions to disturbing material—and may even increase them.
posted by Megami (28 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- loup



 
Apparently, "the point [of trigger warnings as studied here] 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.".

Which explains the thesis. However, if you *do* use trigger warnings to just avoid things that trigger you, they might work well.

Ugh, arrgh, yes, making a bigger deal out of something that's already stressful does make it worse.
posted by amtho at 2:05 AM on September 29, 2021 [25 favorites]


It seems unlikely that there is any effect of trigger warnings that is universal. Surely they are some degree of helpful to some people and some degree of unhelpful to others?
posted by straight at 2:55 AM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


Hair trigger warnings.
posted by fairmettle at 2:56 AM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


This feels deliberately disingenuous considering pretty much everyone I’ve seen advocating for trigger warnings or content notes intends them to be used to help determine if you should engage with a particular piece of media. Not all that shocked to see they’re significantly less useful when all they amount to is a sign saying “you’re going to engage with this traumatic content and there’s nothing you can do to avoid that, sucks to be you”.
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 3:09 AM on September 29, 2021 [78 favorites]


This feels deliberately disingenuous considering pretty much everyone I’ve seen advocating for trigger warnings or content notes intends them to be used to help determine if you should engage with a particular piece of media.

The context here is the classroom, which is where the concept of trigger warnings has been debated for a long time and where they are the most fraught with difficulties for there being reasons why some texts may assigned as necessary reading or where those elements are just so wrapped up in the history of the subject it becomes almost impossible to avoid them. Trigger warnings in that setting could possibly be more harmful than helpful, though a content warning provided before a student signs up for the class may still be of some use.
posted by gusottertrout at 3:33 AM on September 29, 2021 [25 favorites]


The use of trigger warnings in university classes (probably particularly in North America?) is different from general use online. Personally, I prefer the phrasing “content note” or “content warning” in either context, since mental health triggers can vary widely between individuals so “trigger warning” feels a bit presumptive to me, and the term has been used outside of its actual mental health context at times to the detriment of those who have ptsd, and its use has been politicized in ways that probably give it negative connotations for those who aren’t very well informed about the relevant mental health issues (which includes most people on the internet, and most university students). I only read the first part of the article before I encountered the paywall restriction - did they also look at the effects of these alternate phrasings?

Or, on preview, much overlap with what gusottertrout said.
posted by eviemath at 3:39 AM on September 29, 2021 [24 favorites]


Trigger-warning studies, however, have revealed that giving trigger warnings does not seem to result in recipients choosing to avoid the material. Instead, the warned individuals tended to forge ahead.

If those suffering from P.T.S.D. were responding to trigger warnings by opting out of reading or discussing the flagged content, then, as McNally has pointed out, that would be concerning from a mental-health point of view, because the clinical consensus is that avoiding triggers worsens P.T.S.D.


This is what I've seen as an argument against trigger warnings; that they encourage avoidance and are actually a net-negative from that point of view. Interesting to see noted that this isn't generally the case.

It may well be that, at this point, trigger warnings have developed a spinoff cultural meaning that departs from the aim of providing psychological aid to those who suffer from trauma. A trigger warning might really function as a signal to the subset of students who are looking for it that the teacher is sensitive to their concerns—or at least compliant with their requests—regardless of psychological benefit or harm.


This also rings true to me but I fully admit to being an outside observer in not creating content that needs warnings, not in academia nor needing these warnings myself.

And eviemath, yeah, the article addresses "renaming" at least briefly:

One alternative, suggested by the Brandeis list, is to replace “trigger warning” with “content note.” Would that be an improvement? Bellet told me that “what really matters is not so much what you’re calling it as what you’re insinuating about a reaction.” Jones added that “humans are pretty smart about language, so, when you say ‘content note,’ if what you really mean is trigger warning, people are going to figure that out very quickly, and then the advantage of using a different word is gone.”
posted by slimepuppy at 3:47 AM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


Ya, the thesis makes sense in an academic setting where a person is going to be forced/pressured to consume the media anyways. And it seems like ptsd treatment would be more structured than random exposure, at least at some point, otherwise it wouldn't really need treatment at all and would just go away over time. But there are lots of people who don't meet a clinical definition of ptsd who want to avoid certain topics for their mental well being. I don't have ptsd about dogs dieing but I'm going to continue to vet media with Does The Dog Die because those events can make me sad for days afterwards and generally ruin any movie. So why watch in the first place? The term trigger warning has evolved in non academic settings to include those people.
posted by Mitheral at 4:34 AM on September 29, 2021 [12 favorites]


the thesis makes sense in an academic setting where a person is going to be forced/pressured to consume the media anyways.

Yeah, there are times where it isn't even necessarily the text itself that could be an issue, but the surrounding class discussion if the text suggests something that other students might explore in talking about their responses as that is part of understanding a text in some instances.

On the other hand, back when concerns over trigger warnings were first getting a lot of attention, there was a very reasonable take by some teachers to do better in thinking about the texts they gave students, particularly in introductory classes, where habit of reliance on certain "canonical" works could be easily bypassed without loss of relevance to what was being taught. An intro to film theory class, for example, could skip the common clip use of the shower scene in Psycho or the eye scene from Un Chien Andalou if they were just trying to show how editing works or whatnot. That kind of forethought in choices can help make classes more accessible for everyone.
posted by gusottertrout at 4:57 AM on September 29, 2021 [22 favorites]


If people with a health need advocate for it, and everyone shits all over them for the next 10 years, studies like this only reek of ablism and bias.
posted by wellifyouinsist at 5:25 AM on September 29, 2021 [23 favorites]


A trigger warning might really function as a signal to the subset of students who are looking for it that the teacher is sensitive to their concerns—or at least compliant with their requests—regardless of psychological benefit or harm. The choice to send such a signal is of course part of a teacher’s academic freedom. But it is important to undertake it with the understanding that signalling compassion for students and trauma survivors in this particular way may be at cross purposes with helping them, whether psychologically or pedagogically.

One of the things I really like about this piece is the acknowledgement that humans are constantly learning and adapting, and that the signals we embed in our course content are therefore doing a lot of things at once. PTSD is a de facto disorder of learning: you create a strong association between a stressful experience and a sense that you are not safe and will not be protected, and then that learned association doesn't un-learn even when cues of the stressor appear in non stressful contexts. So it does make sense that euphemizing a concept isn't necessarily going to change how people react to it--unless there's a contextual difference in which types of people are likely to use one phrasing versus another, which people are then likely to learn and form associations for.

It's also interesting that the findings that trigger warnings can make experiences worse are specific to students that agree that words can be triggers. I wonder how that question was specifically worded, because I can see it signifying a few different things to different people: a) do you personally have a strong trigger coded to a specific word, or are your triggers about attitudes about words; or b) do you have cultural allegiences about the use of trigger warnings that give you strong opinions about their use (i.e. trigger warnings are "the libs yelling" and a cue of a potential conflict). Because trigger warnings are a highly politicized concept, and because people calling for content warnings often have a lot of conflicting ideas about what that should look like in practice and how that should interact with what kinda of content people shoot be exposed to, I would want to be extremely careful about the ways these questions are posed in order to have a sense for how much I trust the results.

(But also: it's 7am, I'm ambling through my daily routine on mobile, and I'm too lazy to go digging through the supplements of the actual peer reviewed studies at this exact moment.)

I do note that there's also a fair amount of wiggle room with respect to allowing students to opt in or out of potentially triggering content that often gets left out of these debates, because they tend to focus on K12 reading experiences where students are given almost no control over how they engage with material rather than college courses where students may be able to pick and choose to an extent around. There is often a lot of pearl clutching in these conversations that centers around assumptions of instructor control in how and whether students engage with the material, and I think a lot of objection to trigger warnings and students' responses to triggering content comes out of reactions to a threat to instructor control of students, or reactions to that control on the part of students.

I did some coursework in college that was extremely triggering, and in a few cases I did in fact just skip readings or discussions because the emotional costs of grappling with them seemed extremely unlikely to actually further my ability to grasp the coursework. This never actually affected my grades, because generally speaking there wasn't any loss to my ability to comprehend the material--indeed, I was skipping the content because I already knew the things it was focusing on. I often find that I do a better job as an instructor if I think about devising coursework such that it provides a structure that generally enables learning depending on how students engage with it and then emotionally disengage myself with how much effort students choose to put into my specific class and the outcomes those specific students get. I care a lot about my students, but I don't think it's a personal insult if a student chooses to allocate effort to my class below other concerns in their lives; that will usually be reflected in their grades, but that's okay.

And to be clear: I am sometimes talking about subjects that are "controversial", like evolution in red states, or talking about genetically modified organisms and technologies for creating them, in my work. I also sometimes talk about things that in my experience are potential triggers in an educational context for certain students, like the time I lead a classroom discussion on hormonal signaling that my instructors of record chose to ask the class to take to a place of talking about trans students in sport.

When I can control these things, I try to warn students in advance so students can pace or regulate their own engagement with content. For me, one of the most triggering things I ever did in an educational setting was turn up to class and listen to a classroom discussion about whether you, J Q Random Student, could ever date an inorgasmic person. I absolutely did not need to sit through that as a learning experience even if the question had a lot of educational value to the other students in the room, and my education would probably have benefitted from being allowed to skip it instead of dissociating aggressively for the rest of the day. Other students maybe benefited strongly from asking themselves that question, but being able to control my interaction with their reactions would have been really useful to me.

When I cannot control what exactly we are doing, because I am not the instructor of record, I try to proactively signal to groups of students I think are more likely to tense up and be triggered by the topic that I can see them and am aware of their experiences: I am careful about pronoun use and word choice, I ask questions and nonverbally react to students' answers, and I always imagine that there is one affected student that I do not know in the room at any time.

But it's hard, and I do think there is a lot of nuance in the way that instructors handle these concepts that gets missed by broad strokes responses to the concept of trigger warnings per se.
posted by sciatrix at 5:26 AM on September 29, 2021 [28 favorites]


But there are lots of people who don't meet a clinical definition of ptsd who want to avoid certain topics for their mental well being. I don't have ptsd about dogs dieing but I'm going to continue to vet media with Does The Dog Die because those events can make me sad for days afterwards and generally ruin any movie. So why watch in the first place? The term trigger warning has evolved in non academic settings to include those people.

This is what I was going to say. For me, I just really dislike reading most novels where incest or child abuse is a theme -- not from personal trauma, but because it affects how I feel for days and days after reading it. The use of those themes in novels goes in and out of fashion, but still shows up a lot in literature; and I appreciate reviewers who flag that this is a theme rather than preserving the surprise.

In the context of a university class, there is a difference between a warning that a reading has some kind of disturbing content but that everyone is expected to read it with no exceptions, or a warning that includes some possible alternatives for students for whom that reading is an issue. It seems obvious that the first isn't going to reduce trauma, it will just reduce surprises (which in itself is a good thing).
posted by Dip Flash at 6:26 AM on September 29, 2021 [3 favorites]


I really think this is discounting agency to choose engagement especially in the context of PTSD. For me trigger warnings weren't useful in my education the way they were written about here. It certainly wasn't helping me learn even when I dragged myself through that material because I would be overwhelmed, it wasn't helping me solve my PTSD, which is still ongoing and took far too much therapy and medication to get it to a manageable level, and really wasn't meaningful overall in terms of how I reacted to trauma content in the long term. That type of exposure did absolutely nothing but give me flashbacks. Did sometimes I
I have more anxiety? maybe. But I also just suffered with terrible anxiety at that time.

But what these warnings did do was provide the power and ability for me to chose my level of engagement, for me to actively recognize when something was too much, when to seek additional support, or request and accommodation. This was HUGE. It was in those moments of navigation I was specifically taking care of myself, I was respecting my limits, looking for support. I was acknowledging what had happened while simultaneously giving myself space to process in my own way. And giving myself a bit of control.

When PTSD gets boiled down to avoidance = bad non avoidance = good, many of the other issues that can be a part of PTSD get lost . Disassociative tendencies, sleep issues, flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, sense of foreshortened future, emotional disregulation, etc, etc, etc. For someone like me who tended to ignore all of my problems until I was in absolutely no question mental health crisis, those little moments of navigating the world PTSD in mind were the first time I was really paying attention to starting to try and form a healthier life.
posted by AlexiaSky at 7:02 AM on September 29, 2021 [21 favorites]


I think it’s unsurprising that being told a person in authority knows that an article has content likely to trigger you and being forced to read it anyhow is worse than being able to assume they were ignorant of it. This also applies to sciatrix’s comments above about terrible classroom discussion that the instructor isn’t skilled enough to cut off or actually thinks is helpful - it’s not just that your classmates have bad opinions, it’s that your instructor lets them suck up your dearly-paid-for class time with ignorant-to-hateful bloviating and doesn’t challenge it.

I appreciate content warnings in daily life - sometimes that article isn’t a good choice to read on my lunch break or listen to while driving. Radio news has made me cry pretty regularly my whole adult life, and I’m not a frequent crier otherwise, it’s something about the medium.
posted by momus_window at 7:26 AM on September 29, 2021 [6 favorites]


Please understand that trigger warnings are for everyone's safety; not just the person with PTSD. The monster is sleeping, do not wake it up.
posted by interogative mood at 7:59 AM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


If those suffering from P.T.S.D. were responding to trigger warnings by opting out of reading or discussing the flagged content, then, as McNally has pointed out, that would be concerning from a mental-health point of view, because the clinical consensus is that avoiding triggers worsens P.T.S.D.

Hi, psychotherapist (and person with PTSD) here and this is a deeply inaccurate and potential harmful framing. It's a bit like saying, "the clinical consensus is that avoiding walking after a knee injury worsens physical mobility" which is maybe sort of true or at least contains some element of true. But it's a complex and delicate situation. For most people, the best thing to do after a knee injury is probably some combination of resting to give the knee some time to heal and resuming gentle physical activity, all the while carefully monitoring the impacts and going slow. And there's no one size fits all prescription here--what's needed varies based on the person's individual body, pre-existing rhythms, level of physical ability, past history of knee injuries, access to awareness of their body, and probably more that I don't know about because I'm not actually a physical therapist or a doctor! I do know that there's risks associated with adding too much stress too fast and also with not moving enough.

The same basic idea applies to mental health and healing from PTSD. There's a crucial concept here called the window of tolerance, which is the range of discomfort and painful experience that a person's nervous system and psyche can handle processing. And, yes, if a person avoids and disassociates too much, their window of tolerance can shrink. But also if a person is exposed to too much triggering material without enough support and grounding and access to resources (both internally/emotionally and externally/socially), they can be retraumatized.

Ideally a person spends a good amount of time at the growing edge, the place just within the window of tolerance, and has decent enough experiences around handling discomfort--this is how one can grow and expand the window of tolerance. Also, importantly, one's window of tolerance inevitably and naturally varies from day to day, based on factors like amount of sleep, level of support and connection, general life stress, engagement in self-regulation and co-regulation, etc. And so, even when it's going well and a person is well-resourced, they are going to need to take breaks from triggering content. In just the same way that doing any kind of work, even the basic work of being awake and alive, sometimes requires breaks, aka going to sleep.

Additionally, for many, many people a key aspect of their trauma history is having their choice and autonomy taken away or disrespected. So in many cases it may be more important to give people the choice about whether or not to engage with potentially triggering content than to make certain they are engaging with some externally defined timetable about how to engage with triggers.

It's like, should this person watch a video that might be triggering? I don't know, should this person with a knee injury go on a twenty minute walk? I can't and don't want to answer that question for anyone else but I would ask more questions in response, probably. How's their knee feeling today? How long has it been since the injury? How much has the person been walking recently? What does the person know about their own capacity? What's the terrain the person will be walking on like? Is there an exit strategy if things go badly?

Honestly (speaking more as a traumatized person than a therapist now) this shit makes me so angry. It's like we've been saying, "hey, it would be very helpful having a sign that gives information about the length and steepness of this hike so we can make informed choices about whether to go on it and what to bring if we need more support" and so many people are like, fuck you, there will be no sign, and obviously the healthy thing for you to do is just walk, just keep walking, walk walk walk, you might get hurt if you just sit around all day, what are you, lazy? Just AAARGH.
posted by overglow at 8:22 AM on September 29, 2021 [75 favorites]


I would never call something a trigger warning on a syllabus. I do indicate when a source deals with obviously troubling material. This material is unavoidable in, for example, a discussion of the development of criminal law and my students know that. They are adults and can decide how they want to approach a source that is particularly difficult. There's lots of material that you don't want to read right before bed, PTSD or not.
posted by sfred at 8:25 AM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


A previous discussion on one such study arguing that trigger warnings are ineffective or counterproductive. I was unconvinced by that paper, at least.
posted by biogeo at 9:52 AM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


As a person with PTSD I would just like to hard agree with overglow ‘s entire comment.
posted by corb at 11:13 AM on September 29, 2021 [10 favorites]


The underlying problem is that we have allowed teachers to think they can abuse students with zero repercussions. In fact the culture is so screwed up that no only is this behavior unpunished it is rewarded as “research” credited to the professor.

Forcing a student to read material that triggers their PTSD is emotionally abusive. It is no less hurtful than punching someone in the head. In fact the many of the same physiological responses can be observed in term of adrenalin, cortisol, and the fight/flight reflexes.

It is no different than if the teacher demanded a student in a wheel chair get up and run a quarter mile. Then failed them for refusing.

Honestly this makes me furious.
posted by interogative mood at 12:17 PM on September 29, 2021 [7 favorites]


If people with a health need advocate for it, and everyone shits all over them for the next 10 years, studies like this only reek of ablism and bias.

I agreed with this on first reading, but then what about unwell people who swear by homeopathy?
posted by storybored at 12:43 PM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


I think the more basic question that negative studies like this raise is, where's the science that shows how to use trigger warnings effectively? Without people having to analyze this by resorting to lay knowledge or common sense. It would be especially useful to have empirical evidence ("evidence-based") on trigger warnings without reducing psychology of PTSD to neo-behavioralist theories.
posted by polymodus at 1:27 PM on September 29, 2021 [5 favorites]


Even more infuriating is that a simple google search just points back to this original study which seems to have been picked up by the mainstream media without even the slightest thought that the entire study is garbage.
posted by interogative mood at 2:14 PM on September 29, 2021


wish we could just have a journalistic ethic where platforms would only publish on incredibly sensational, linkbaity topics if

1) there were meta-analyses / reviews where strong evidence were found

2) and that these meta-analyses / reviews were given a good spot-check by someone who has a better understanding of statistics than a law professor

disingenuous is a very diplomatic way of saying probably harmful and negligent. also I'm not really sure what's going on at the New Yorker but it's become a platform that I'm starting to grow more and more skeptical of in terms of quality and morals (remember this bullshit?)

perhaps the editors should reconsider shuffling off their content production to third-parties, like this law professor guy, in the hopes of fucking over their union
posted by paimapi at 2:45 PM on September 29, 2021 [7 favorites]


Hi, psychotherapist (and person with PTSD) here and this is a deeply inaccurate and potential harmful framing.

Overglow's comment is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Please read it in its entirety. Then print it out, hang it on the wall, and read it twice a day until you have it memorized.

Thank you overglow for your beautiful explanation.
posted by medusa at 3:38 PM on September 29, 2021 [8 favorites]


Overglow, flagged as fantastic. Which I rarely do.
posted by BlueNorther at 3:58 AM on September 30, 2021 [2 favorites]


Honestly, my reflexive grumpy response to this is "Yeah, abled people sure do love anything that lets them deny accommodations and feel virtuous about it."
And there's probably a much more nuanced and constructive conversation to be had based off this article, but I don't think my reflexive grumpy response is wrong.
posted by BlueNorther at 4:06 AM on September 30, 2021 [11 favorites]


I think it's worth noting that the author of this article, Jeannie Suk Gersen, has an axe to grind on this issue (among others), and I would not be inclined to accept her representation of what the science is showing.

I don't know what the fuck is happening at Harvard Law but at this point it seems like a fair bet you could make the above statement about most situations in which one of its faculty opines on, well, anything.
posted by sinfony at 7:49 AM on September 30, 2021 [7 favorites]


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