Do Trigger Warnings Help Trauma Victims?

In our lust for mental health and in our conviction that we must never do anything to harm the emotions of anyone else, we have adopted what are called trigger warnings.

When teachers in college and even high school assign materials that might be distressing to anyone who has suffered a trauma,  they often include a trigger warning. By that they mean to protect the vulnerable students from the chance that the material might provoke traumatic emotions. Forewarned is forearmed… so to speak.

The logic seems impeccable. You suffered a sexual assault. If you now read about a sexual assault, the story risks provoking the negative emotions you suffered, only to aggravate your condition.

And yet, alas, it does not seem to work that way. Writing for PsyPost, Vladimir Hedrih summarizes the research into the matter:

Modern academic literature often contains trigger warnings – statements intended to warn readers about potentially disturbing materials that might exacerbate their distress related to a previous trauma. However, a new experiment on U.S. students showed that reading passages about physical and sexual assault did not lead to much distress, regardless of trauma history, trigger warning type, and students post-traumatic disorder scores. The study was published in the Journal of American College Health.

Trigger warnings are meant to allow individuals who have experienced trauma to be warned in advance about material that may elicit unwanted, intrusive memories from their past.

Theoretically, such warnings should be particularly protective of persons with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in whom such materials might trigger strong emotional and physiological responses. The idea is that if such people are warned in advance, they will be able to avoid emotional distress.

Naturally, we want to know why this should be so. The researchers have the answer. It’s all about desensitization.

When we suffer a trauma we need to process it. We need to reduce the threat, not to enhance it. When we face the facts we tend to reduce the threat. When we avoid it at all costs, we make the threat that much more dangerous. In truth, as happens when people undergo treatment for phobias, the path to treatment lies in reducing the threat, not in enhancing or even empowering it.

Thus, reading about a bad experience from a book or seeing it portrayed in a movie tends to mitigate the danger and to aid in processing trauma.

Q.E.D.