to think trigger warnings are pointless?

[AgnestaVipers]

I have just come across this meta-analysis of the research on the effectiveness of trigger warnings.

twitter.com/paytonjjones/status/1563950340944560128?t=wiSabn0PLlY2d2NEo2TSDQ&s=19

TL;DR: they don't work.

I have been astonished lately that trigger warnings are put on things like books on English Literature degree courses.

Has anyone ever found them useful?

For years and years TV and radio have been warning about "scenes of XYZ that viewers may find distressing" and I don't think a trigger warning is any different really apart from the specific words used.

I like 'content note'. I do worry that somehow woman are starting to portray themselves as fragile when actually given what many of them cope with we are strong.

I find it more bizarre that people would rail against increasing compassion. It's not soft or indeed 'woke' to apply TW to upsetting content. Surely it can only be a good thing. I was once in a talk and the presenter steered into an issue that had had a profound effect on me. Had I known that she would have steered in that direction I would have gladly waited outside.

We are not portraying 'ourselves' as fragile by finding TW's beneficial, others are portraying us as fragile despite the fact that as pp's rightly point out there have been announcements prior to tv shows and films warning about "distressing content" or "scenes some viewers may find upsetting" for donkeys years.

I don't get why people get so incensed at thr idea of trigger warnings. You're free to ignore them. You're accusing people of being fragile but getting worked up at a couple of words at the start of a piece of work. Maybe we need trigger warnings for trigger warnings.

Oh, and why not link to the actual study instead if a twitter thread?

This is fair enough if it's graphic. I don't want to watch scenes of child or animal abuse.

BUT I watched Pam and Tommy recently and in the long list of content warnings was "contains scenes of tobacco use". C'mon now 😂

They're pointless.

If I see TW: suicide, I'll be thinking about suicide.

We just need to learn to get on with life and deal with hard stuff.

Multiple posters on this thread have said they find them helpful.

I remember a poster on MN saying she was triggered by the word in the trigger warning. So for some, it is pointless.

Trigger warnings certainly have their place with the big usual ones like suicide, abuse, death etc. I have seen people insist on trigger warnings for things like mothers/fathers day, or dogs. I have seen someone ask for one about bicycles, and another about houses.

Saying that, I do like the quote... "It's easier to put on slippers than to carpet the whole world".

You don't mean "we". You mean "you traumatised people" and you have no right to demand that of them. None.

The phrase itself may be a bit annoying but the idea of letting people know they might be about to encounter something traumatic is perfectly sane and legitimate. I teach literature and sometimes mention that a difficult subject is going to be touched on - not so that students can run from the room and avoid it all, but so they can mentally prepare themselves if necessary, and also to remind me to handle it thoughtfully without making assumptions about how people ‘should’ feel. @AgnestaVipers is this the sort of thing you find ‘astonishing’ and ‘incredible’? Because it’s really not that big a drama.

@ChagSameachDoreen There is a massive difference between reading the word suicide in a TW note at the start of a show and being suprised by a sudden graphic depiction of suicide.
I read the TW sexual assault and can think "yeah watching that might be hard for me" and then I can decide not to, therefore I can 'get on with life and deal with hard stuff' by not choosing not to watch horrific depictions of events that destroyed me.
I like having the choice to 'deal with hard stuff how I want to'. All of the sexual assault was pretty hard to deal with. I don't consider being lead, without warning, into watching scenes of gratuitous sexual violence, an important part of me getting on with my life.

This is the reason why I find it helpful on mn. There are so many threads that are deleted by sensitive mods because they’ve been complained about by sensitive people. At least if you have a Tw in the title you can argue that you made it clear what the thread was about, and you have more chance of keeping it

I think trigger warnings on literature courses can be vital. Often in a literature based degree the student has a choice of works to study (eg pick this or that topic, each topic has these 4 books or similar). So a brief content note is useful to help a student to decide if it's something they can effectively study. Or if it's a compulsory text, then they can mentally prepare themselves.
Personal experience: at uni, I had a choice of topics, two books per topic, no info on the plot of said books online (too niche/ not well known). I chose a topic only to discover that both of the books centred around graphic descriptions of suicide, both the act and the mental torment leading up to it. At the time I was in an abusive environment and actively suicidal. So, predictably, I had a breakdown, emailed my tutor to request a topic change, for which I then had to read the novels and produce the essay during the vacation, when everyone else was already revising. So yeah, a content note on the book list would've been handy. Not snowflake behaviour, but a survival mechanism.

And to pp who said we can't have tws on every piece of art we encounter - you're right on that. However if I open up a book in day to day life to find something hugely triggering of my mental illnesses, I have the option to close it again, to take a break and come back to it, or to not read it at all. If I have to do it for uni I have usually a week to read a couple of novels and write an essay on them alongside whatever else. So I don't have the luxury of saying "you know what, I can't cope with that rn, I'll maybe read it next month", therefore I need to be able to make an informed choice of text in advance. Believe me, I'd rather not have cPTSD and be able to read whatever I like whenever I like!

Oh good it's been over a week since the last trigger warnings bashing thread (though this one thankfully has a lot less moaning about woke snowflakes).

Why on earth are you so surprised that raped children, or refugees, or kids who watched their dad beat up their mum every night, might have mental illnesses like PTSD? These threads are so snobbish. The assumption is that it's Cressida who has blue hair and goes to Kings demanding TW, when in reality it's Chantal who was gang raped on her estate by local boys who then called her a slut, or Chilemba who was a child soldier. It's the assumption that only naice middle class white kids go to university , and that minorities and people who have been oppressed and abused don't know how to stand up for themselves and can't possibly be educated enough to know what a trigger warning is.

I posted about this in the last thread, but I was forced to read a book about incest for my A Levels while I was living alone in a bedsit having escaped an incestuous abusive home, and reading it caused me to develop psychosis and very seriously self-harm.

A classmate of mine was a mature student and a refugee who worked as a translator, and due to the languages she spoke all she did all day was translate testimony about torture and genocide, and she was assigned 'An Evil Cradling' and had to request another book because otherwise she would have been exposed to nothing but graphic torture both at work and at uni.

Anyone who hasn't been raped or experienced other major trauma please fuck the fuck off this thread.

Why are you so very very angry and incensed at the mere existence of something that saves child rape survivors from potentially kill them that literally does not affect you in any way whatsoever?

A trigger warning lets me know that this might not be appropriate to read on the bus. Or on the day before my period, when I'm ready to burst into tears on the drop of a hat.

In the context of a university degree, it would let me know that I might need to arrange some extra support, like a counselling session, or a phone call with a friend, or that I should sit by the door in case I need to leave halfway through to have a quick cry in the loo.

I think testing that sort of effect would be both difficult to execute, and extremely challenging to get past an ethics committee.

As for fragility vs strength - a stick is strong until it breaks, but a blade of grass flexes in the wind and flourishes.

Which is more fragile?

I think they're vital on certain threads.

No, they are useless.

When people talk about trigger warnings on threads, really what they are is just an appropriate title. They aren't really trigger warnings as such.

The main reason they aren't really very useful in most settings is that the things that trigger people are not necessarily straightforward or directly related to any kind of trauma. And they tend to be highly individual.

They can be irritating and unhelpful if inappropriate.

I read an article on the front page of a student newspaper that had "Content warning: suicide" at the top, just below the headline.

The sum total of the offending material in the article was something like "may have thoughts of suicide", towards the end of the piece somewhere. Which is not significantly more likely to cause someone problems than the word "Suicide" in big letters at the top, where far more people will glance at it and see it when they walk past someone reading it, or come across a stack of newspapers.

And people who do need to avoid graphic descriptions of suicide or suicidal ideation have unnecessarily avoided an article that's probably no more triggering than the content warning itself.

People giving a generic content warning before even very minor mentions of a topic, a content warning that's indistinguishable from the one they would give for a lengthy, detailed treatment of the subject, are not helping. If you want to avoid coming across descriptions or portrayals of actual suicide or of suicidal ideation, but everything which even makes brief mention of it is marked equally, then you either have to miss out on a lot of stuff that would've been fine, or risk exposing yourself to the thing you wanted to avoid (albeit with a vague warning).

I’m a little suprised they don’t work altho my experience of them is limited to online forums / social media

i think they are a great idea

If we're talking about whether they work and what this study tells us about that, first we'd have to decide what "working" means or would look like (helping people avoid stuff altogether, and in what contexts? or helping them be prepared for upcoming material?), and then we'd have to decide whether this study is evaluating that.

Usually in order to be able to create a feasible study, researchers would have to define what specific outcomes they're testing and create a carefully defined way to test them, which will be quite narrow and won't always reflect the wide and varied ways something is used, or any of the broader effects.

Like, it's theoretically possible that content warnings are great at helping people avoid things that trigger unpleasant symptoms, but that people who get content warnings and avoid triggers tend not to recover from PTSD, while people who don't get content warnings and do get triggered are more likely to recover. (I don't think that's true, but just for the sake of argument.) So whether or not they work depends on what you mean by work. But this study couldn't evaluate anything like that. (Plus, if that were the case you'd then have an ethical dilemma — is it okay to expose people to distressing stuff because you think it's probably going to be good for them?)

It's an interesting-looking study but I'd like to see someone who knows how to do these things doing a breakdown of the methodology and the stats and stuff, to check if it holds up. It looks like more of a preliminary look at content warnings than an comprehensive analysis of how and whether they work.

On the whole they’re pointless.

I’ve seen thread titles along the line of “my friend committed suicide,” which is naturally a triggering post for some. However someone will then come on to the thread and say “your thread title should have a trigger warning.” Except that surely the mention of suicide is a trigger warning in itself?

Also trigger warnings have been trivialised. people are expected to add trigger warnings on to threads about spiders, about dogs, about heights, dogs and spiders and heights are a fact of life. if your phobia is such that you can’t even read about them or see pictures on the internet then you need to step away from the internet and seek professional help.

Also, it can sometimes be the unpredictable stuff, things that people wouldn't think to (or couldn't) put a content warning on, that are really difficult to deal with.

I did a load of therapy for the traumatic shit that happened to me, no longer had other symptoms, and thought I had really dealt with the problem as much as reasonably possible. What suddenly, unexpectedly got me, years after the therapy, was one scene out of a short "fun" promotional video for an NHS mental health trust, showing some nurses on their new ward running down a corridor towards a camera. For other people, it could be something else equally apparently innocuous (though I do think if they'd thought about that scene of the video a little more they'd have noticed it could be… unhelpful for people with certain experiences). Early on, before the years of forgetting and learning to cope and eventually talking about it in therapy, it was things like the smell of dust, or seeing a dent in a skirting board, or being hugged in a particular way. I was never really badly affected by descriptions or portrayals in media.

For people who benefit from content warnings then fair enough, but they're really limited, and I think they need to be applied carefully rather than indiscriminately or you're making it impossible for traumatised people to distinguish graphic/detailed stuff from mentions that are no more detailed than the content warning itself.