Trigger warnings: What are they and do they work?

 

What is a trigger warning: It is a statement made prior to sharing potentially disturbing content. That content might include graphic references to topics such as sexual abuse, self-harm, violence, eating disorders, and so on, and can take the form of an image, video clip, audio clip, or piece of text.

Trigger warnings were designed to help people decide what to read and what not to read. It warned people who were suffering from tragedy or trauma that stories or articles contained material that could upset them.

Many people ignore or simply don’t read them, but I believe in many cases, these warnings are important to trauma victims.

Sounds good, right? Well, not so fast.

Before I get into this, here are my thoughts about the surveys.

Are surveys correct: You can make a survey support anything you want if you word it right and use people who agree with you. If you took a survey of all the people they talked to in those studies, how many of them are suffering from trauma?  

Scientific studies: Trigger warnings may have been developed under incredibly well-meaning pretenses, but they have now failed to prove useful in study after study. Like many a random supplement, trigger warnings are probably useless for most people.

A few studies even found that people with PTSD symptoms are, more drawn to content with trigger warnings.

Mark Manson in his recent Mindfu*k Monthly Newsletter, wrote, He doubted trigger warnings work, anyway. Anyone who has studied psychology (or advertising) for half a minute knows that people are drawn to what upsets them, not the opposite.

He continued, that researchers have been studying trigger warnings for the past seven years and a couple weeks ago, the first meta-analysis was done to gauge how effective they have been. Meta-analyses are a big deal because they gather all the major studies that have been done on a topic and pull all the data together as though they were done in one giant piece of research. This gets them to a dependable result. And regarding trigger warnings, the results were stark: They don’t help. At all. And in some limited cases, they may even make things worse.

Arguments for: Trigger warnings may be pointless for someone who doesn't have triggers, but for anyone who does that could be a lot of stress avoided. Helping someone avoid harm is never pointless.

Arguments against: Trigger warnings are pointless, people are too sensitive, trigger warnings don't exist in the "real world," and trigger warnings are censorship.

Supporters argue that many of those who are against trigger warnings are typically people without PTSD or people who have overcome their own trauma and disregard how those still struggling are coping with theirs.

Common agreement: A survey of national college educators revealed supporters and critics of trigger warnings alike are opposed to being required to use them. Whether or not to use warnings should be the exclusive prerogative of individual instructors and not influenced by department heads, deans, or administrators.

That is probably how most writers feel. If they want to use them, they can and if not, they don’t need to use them. It shouldn’t be mandatory.

No matter what surveys show and what the majority of people think about them, they are here to stay, and I support that 100%.