If you have been in a college classroom these days or see what one of your friends on the Far Left post on Facebook recently, odds are that you have come across a trigger warning. A trigger warning is that prefatory disclaimer letting the reader or listener know that the material has the potential to trigger a post-traumatic stress reaction. Trigger warnings started in the 1990s with feminists writing on Internet message boards in discussions of sexual assault. What was meant to be used for a narrow range of topics, such as sexual assault or mental health (e.g., depression, PTSD), became more ubiquitous and widespread on the Internet and print media.
Before you know it, trigger warnings made their way to college classrooms. Those arguing for trigger warnings in the classroom said that without trigger warnings, students might be made quite uncomfortable with the topics discussed. Conservatives and libertarians argue that trigger warnings in college classrooms coddle students and stifle free speech on college campuses. I agree with that sentiment. Their usage on college campuses illustrates how trigger warnings are like other forms of political correctness in the sense that they are forms of thought and speech control under the guise of making the world a better place. Aside from getting a degree for job marketability, one of the main purposes of college is to expose students to multiple points of view in order to be able to think critically. If you need to silence discomfort with a trigger warning, what kind of person does that make you? But I digress.
There are multiple topics that could potentially trigger someone with PTSD or some other trauma. It is equally true that the triggers are "unpredictable and individually specific." Since they are not rational or universally foreseeable, it is unrealistic to be able to account for all triggers, especially in such a venue as a college campus.
This concept leads to one of the main issues with trigger warnings: they do not have positive effects. Last March, a paper in Clinical Psychological Science found that trigger warnings do not make anyone else worse off, but also that they don't help either (Sanson et al., 2019). Other research has found a negligible impact (e.g., Bridgland et al., 2019).
There has been limited research on the topic, but three Harvard professors released a groundbreaking paper on the effects of trigger warnings last week (Jones et al., 2019). This paper measured the effects of trigger warning on those with PTSD, the very sort of individuals that would theoretically best benefit from a trigger warning. The paper found that trigger warnings are not helpful for trauma survivors. Even worse than that, the authors found "substantial evidence that trigger warnings countertherapeutically reinforce survivors' view of their trauma as central to their identity." The conclusion of the authors was that there is no-evidence based reason to use trigger warnings. This latest study builds on their previous study (which did not focus on those suffering from PTSD) showing that trigger warnings undermine survivors' emotional resilience (Jones et al., 2018), as well as other work (e.g., Bellet et al., 2018; Wells and Kaptchuk, 2012). The 2019 Harvard study was convincing enough where writer Shannon Palus at the Left-leaning Slate changed her mind on the topic.
The best-case scenario for trigger warnings is that they are useless, although there is growing evidence showing that trigger warnings harms those it was intended to protect. Those who advocate for trigger warnings can no longer hide behind trauma survivors. If they want to help, there should be a larger discussion on mental health. In the meantime, trigger warnings should stop being used as a way to silent dissent.
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