The Trigger Warning Hoax

With all due deference to your oh-so-delicate thin-skinned sensibility we have been told that we must preface every potentially traumatizing utterance or even image with what is called a trigger warning.

The concept arose from the depths of American academic stupidity. It attempted to raise consciousness of the psychological damaged suffered by American college students. It pretended to offer a cure. The cure: trigger warnings. It is one small step before our psycho overlords tell us that triggering words and images must be forbidden.

In the era of hurt feelings, trigger warnings were supposed to protect you against pending psycho calamity. They were supposed to be therapeutic, because, forewarned is forearmed, or some such.

Now, the New York Times reports on academic studies of the effect of trigger warnings. The results of the study: trigger warnings make no difference whatever in your reaction to potentially traumatic stimuli. The author of the story, Niraj Chokshi has done an excellent job. I am happy to bring his story to your attention.

The Times story opens:

For years, trigger warnings have been the subject of impassioned academic debate: Do they protect people from distress or encourage fragility?

The warnings, which alert individuals to disturbing material, have been talked about, used and promoted on college campuses and elsewhere for more than a decade, but little was known about how well they work. Now, a pair of recent studies suggest that they may have little effect at all.

“Although people were distressed by the negative materials we showed them, they were no more or less distressed if they’d seen a trigger warning first,” said Mevagh Sanson of the University of Waikato in New Zealand, the lead author of one of the studies, published this month in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Consider the first statement. Do trigger warnings serve to protect those of us who have unusually thin skin or do they encourage us all to define ourselves as fragile. What good is a trigger warning if you have not suffered enough traumas to be sensitive to triggers? And if you have not, are you presumably lying to us or lying to yourself?

The good news, or the bad news, depending on your trigger sensitivity, is that these warnings do not work. They serve no useful purpose. Telling someone that he is about to watch a simulated homicide will not have any effect on how he reacts… even if in a past life he saw just such a homicide.

One more therapeutic nostrum discredited.

The bad news is that someone somewhere is going to take this research and say that, since trigger warnings do not work, we must ban all potentially traumatizing images. We must purge the airways and public discourse— or, whatever is left of it— of anything that might plausibly be expected to hurt someone’s feelings. Once you head off down that road, you never stop. 

The study does not explain that if we ban all such words and images the result will be that those who have suffered traumas will become increasingly sensitive to them. They will have been deprived of an opportunity to process the traumas, to face their fears and to learn how to become desensitized. A brief reminder: when someone is phobic about, say, spiders, the correct treatment does not remove all images of spiders, or even the word spider, from his force field. It involves gradual desensitization by exposure to images of spiders and even to real spiders. 

As for the experiments, the Times describes them clearly:

In a series of experiments, Dr. Sanson and her colleagues presented hundreds of students and others recruited online with short stories or video clips, all of which featured negative themes, like child abuse, murder, a car accident or physical abuse. Some participants were presented with trigger warnings and some were not. Some also reported having experienced past trauma, like domestic abuse or witnessing a very bad accident.

In each case, the researchers asked participants about their mood before and after reading the passages or watching the clips. They also measured the distressing effects of the material in several other ways, including how it interfered with the participants’ ability to read and understand a subsequent neutral passage.

What the authors found was that trigger warnings had little effect on participants’ mood, how negatively they rated the material or their ability to later read the neutral passage.

As for the debate, trigger warnings send the message that the trauma survivor, as they are now called, is incapable of dealing with the trauma. This contrasts starkly with what should be the therapeutic goal—to help people to overcome their traumas. 

Besides, opponents of trigger warnings suggest that they coddle students. Who would have guessed such a thing:

Opponents of the idea say that trigger warnings coddle students and allow them to avoid discomforting perspectives. Proponents disagree, arguing that they can help those with a history of trauma avoid potentially disturbing material without banning it outright or brace themselves for it.

One problem is simple. A trauma victim might recollect a trauma because he is exposed to, someone who has the same hair color or the same tee shirt as the person who traumatized him. Since triggers can be highly individualized, the chances for covering all of them are nil.

But triggers can come in many forms, including those that may not be predictable, Dr. Wright of the American Psychological Association said. In some cases, a smell or sensation can trigger a traumatic experience even while a depiction of a similar episode won’t.

“Sometimes it’s not even the actual trauma act itself,” she said. “Triggers can be really personalized.”

It gets worse. Emphasizing trigger warnings tells trauma survivors that their trauma defines their lives. Admittedly, this is a standard psycho therapeutic theory, but we should by now have gotten over it:

… researchers at Harvard University recruited a few hundred online participants to read potentially disturbing literary passages, with some receiving a trigger warning and some not.

What they found was that those who received the warnings and strongly believed that words can cause harm reported greater anxiety after reading the distressing passage. The findings also indicated, albeit weakly, that trigger warnings boosted a stigma around trauma: People who saw the warnings were more likely to perceive themselves and others as particularly vulnerable to traumatic events.

The authors also argued that trigger warnings could be counterproductive, encouraging those who have faced trauma to avoid further exposure to it — an effective treatment — and promoting the idea that their trauma is central to who they are.

“If I’m constantly being reminded about how material in my everyday environment relates to my trauma, we may be reinforcing the centrality of that traumatic event to that person’s narrative, driving symptoms up as a result,” said Benjamin Bellet, the lead author of the study and a Ph.D. student at Harvard.

Trigger warnings make us more sensitive to potentially traumatizing experiences. They make it more likely that we will have an anxiety response. And, as noted above, the mania about trigger warnings tells people not to face their fears, but to run screaming into the night.

The Trouble with Trigger Warnings

We have been reporting for some time about the trouble with trigger warnings. Link here. The notion that we must announce to students or the general public that an upcoming image or thought might hurt their feelings by triggering traumatic memories belongs to the era of hurt feelings.

It is a very maternal instinct, one that makes everyone a mother protecting a bunch of big babies from the least discouraging word. As I have noted, people get over traumas by gradual exposure and desensitization. Such has been the cognitive and behavioral approach; it has been shown to be effective. 

Anyway, law professor Jeannie Suk Gerson has brought us up to date on the research, much of which I have already reported on. (via Maggie’s Farm) She reports the conclusion that trigger warnings are not merely useless. They actively cause harm. I am impressed to see that being a law professor qualifies one to report on psychological trauma.

But, you suspected that trigger warnings were, as Gerson says, a hoax. Every time our degenerate culture gloms on to a panacea for psychological damage, you can be fairly confident that the cure will worsen the disease.

Gerson summarizes some research:

Because trigger warnings involve assumptions about emotional reactions, particularly with respect to P.T.S.D., psychology researchers have begun to study whether trigger warnings are in fact beneficial. The results of around a dozen psychological studies, published between 2018 and 2021, are remarkably consistent, and they differ from conventional wisdom: they find that trigger warnings do not seem to lessen negative reactions to disturbing material in students, trauma survivors, or those diagnosed with P.T.S.D. Indeed, some studies suggest that the opposite may be true.

The first one, conducted at Harvard by Benjamin Bellet, a Ph.D. candidate, Payton Jones, who completed his Ph.D. in 2021, and Richard McNally, a psychology professor and the author of “Remembering Trauma,” found that, among people who said they believe that words can cause harm, those who received trigger warnings reported greater anxiety in response to disturbing literary passages than those who did not. (The study found that, among those who do not strongly believe words can cause harm, trigger warnings did not significantly increase anxiety.) Most of the flurry of studies that followed found that trigger warnings had no meaningful effect, but two of them found that individuals who received trigger warnings experienced more distress than those who did not. Yet another study suggested that trigger warnings may prolong the distress of negative memories. 

Most importantly is this observation:

A large study by Jones, Bellet, and McNally found that trigger warnings reinforced the belief on the part of trauma survivors that trauma was central (rather than incidental or peripheral) to their identity. The reason that effect may be concerning is that trauma researchers have previously established that a belief that trauma is central to one’s identity predicts more severe P.T.S.D.; Bellet called this “one of the most well documented relationships in traumatology.” The perverse consequence of trigger warnings, then, may be to harm the people they are intended to protect.

The more you focus on trauma the more you persuade people that they are defined by their traumas. That is, that they are suffering victims, weak and ineffectual, incapable of doing anything to resolve their problems.

The same is true about people who make a public confession of their trauma-induced pain. When you plant the image of you being abused or harassed or assaulted in many minds, these people are going to see you as a victim. The more people treat you as a victim the more you will see yourself as a victim.

It’s one thing to deal with what happened. It’s quite another to deal with the fact that large numbers of people see you as a victim. Once that happens the trauma is much closer to defining you. 

As noted in previous posts, avoiding triggering content does not heal. It aggravates the problem:

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. As McNally has written, treatment of P.T.S.D. patients involves “systematic exposure to traumatic memories until their capacity to trigger distress diminishes.” But, of course, teachers should not undertake to therapize or treat their students—nor should they act in ways that are known to be counter-therapeutic if they can avoid it. Since there isn’t evidence that trigger warnings help, and there is now some evidence that they might even increase anxiety, McNally, Jones, and Bellet do not recommend the use of trigger warnings. As Jones put it, “From a clinical lens, you should never do anything that doesn’t work, period, even if it doesn’t do harm. If it’s not actively helping, encouraging its use would essentially be engaging in clinical pseudoscience.”

The Trigger Warning Illusion

You might have guessed it already, but trigger warnings do not work. When our pseudo-intellectuals glom on to a fashionable idea, especially one that makes them feel virtuous, you can be fairly confident that it is bogus nonsense.

In their war against trauma thinkers have happily touted the notion of trigger warnings. It has been based on the notion that people who have undergone trauma can be triggered by being exposed to the wrong images or words or ideas. And thus, that said wrong images or words or ideas cause distress. And we certainly cannot have that.

Thus, media figures and teachers and even public speakers have been instructed to preface their remarks or their assignments with trigger warnings. This would prepare those who are hypersensitive to run and hide. 

We have already commented on this silliness in the past. To summarize, we have followed the science and have argued that people who want to become desensitized to potentially traumatic stimuli need to be exposed to them, not to avoid them. Such is the treatment mode used by cognitive and behavioral therapists when dealing with trauma victims.

So, limiting exposure would tend to render victims more, not less sensitive. Considering the idiocy that infects public discourse, this should not come as a surprise.

PsyPost reports on the latest research, for your edification:

Trigger warnings, which are statements intended to warn people about being exposed to potentially upsetting material, have garnered much debate as to their effectiveness at protecting people from emotional distress. New research published in PLos ONE suggests that reading about triggering traumatic material did not result in an increase in trauma symptoms in both people who did and people who did not have PTSD symptoms.

Some of the arguments against the use of trigger warnings are focused on the potential adverse, rather than beneficial, effects they have on people. “While a trigger warning may allow individuals to benefit from avoiding potentially distressing material, arguably they also preclude coping with their trauma, potentially adding to their psychological distress,” wrote study author Matthew Kimble and colleagues. “In addition, theory related to expectancy effects and self-fulfilling prophecies suggests that trigger warnings may make individuals more likely to respond poorly to upsetting material or lead them to interpret normal, brief, and appropriate distress as pathological.”

Some research on this topic supports this notion and suggests that receiving a trigger warning might actually increase feelings of vulnerability and anxiety when compared to people who do not receive trigger warnings. Some research even shows that trigger warnings have little effect at all, positive or negative.

As I noted, and as the research has shown, protecting people from exposure to traumatic material makes it more difficult for them to cope with trauma.

And, when you give students the choice between reading and not reading a potentially triggering passage, most choose to read it, trauma or no trauma.

Even if it produces an initial feeling of distress, this wears off in a short period of time. It sounds like exposure therapy, doesn’t it?

Results show most participants (over 96%) opted to read the triggering passage even if they had exposure to traumatic events or scored high on the PTSD checklist. Those higher on the PTSD checklist experienced more emotional responses to the trigger passage than those with lower scores. Further, participants in the trigger passage condition reported feeling significantly more distressed than those in the control condition, but only on the first day of the study. This difference was not seen in the later measurements indicating the distress was not long-lasting.

Trigger Warnings

If message control counts for something, this year’s college commencement season has been hijacked by a band of leftist extremists. Working hand-in-hand with radical leftist professors this group has succeeded in making a number of  high-profile commencement speakers feel unwelcome on campus.

The spectacle of seeing so many distinguished people withdraw from commencement speaking commitments has radically transformed the events. What would normally be a moment of celebration has become a time for debating how far student Brown Shirts should be allowed to dictate what is taught on college campus.

Now, the Empire is striking back, but, you have to wonder whether it is too little, too late. After all, college administrators allowed this to happen. 

Everyone applauded William Bowen, former president of Princeton University and replacement speaker for former Berkeley chancellor, Robert Birgenau, when he told the graduates of Haverford College that they were “immature” and “arrogant.”

Former Brown president Ruth Simmons did well in her commencement address at Smith College to lecture the students on the importance of being able to debate even offensive ideas. Simmons was a last-minute replacement for IMF president Christine Lagarde.

Perhaps we should cheer that the attacks on today’s Brown Shirted reactionaries—disguised as revolutionary radicals—come from both side of the political spectrum.

In today’s Wall Street Journal graduates received the withering contempt of Bret Stephens. He has helped them to become aware of how they look to the outside world. It’s not a pretty picture.

Stephens addressed them directly:

Here you are, 22 or so years on planet Earth, and your entire lives have been one long episode of offense-avoidance. This spotless record has now culminated in your refusals to listen to commencement speakers whose mature convictions and experiences might offend your convictions and experiences, or what passes for them.

He continued:

For the Class of 2014, it seems that inviolable ignorance is the only true bliss.

Just so no one believes that the current commencement kerfuffle is an aberration Stephens recounts some of the nonsense that college students have been studying. This blogger has made an effort to bring it to your attention.

Commencement speakers aside, today’s radical college students have demanded “transformative justice,” have called for awareness of “micro-aggressions” and have pressed for “trigger warnings” on potentially traumatizing classroom material.

Before quoting Stephens, let us underscore that the demand for transformative justice and the discussion of micro-aggressions has been led by the Obama administration. It has not descended from the moon.

Stephens described these phenomena:

In February, students at Dartmouth issued a list of 72 demands for "transformative justice." Among them: "mandate sensitivity training"; "organize continuous external reviews of the College's structural racism, classism, ableism, sexism and heterosexism"; and "create a policy banning the Indian mascot." When the demands weren't automatically met, the students seized an administration building.

At Brown, a Facebook FB +0.32% page is devoted to the subject of "Micro/Aggressions," a growth area in the grievance industry. Example of a micro-aggression: "As a dark-skinned Black person, I feel alienated from social justice spaces or conversations about institutional racism here at Brown when non-Black people of color say things like 'let's move away from the White-Black binary.' "

And then there are "trigger warnings." In Saturday's New York Times,NYT +1.47% Jennifer Medina reports that students and like-minded faculty are demanding warnings on study material that trigger "symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder." Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" was cited by one faculty document at Oberlin as a novel that could "trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more."

Students ought to understand that these efforts to restrict freedom of expression make them look like fools. Thus, the value of their degrees and the respect that they might have received for earning them has diminished.

In Stephens’ words:

Any student who demands—and gets—emotional pampering from his university needs to pay a commensurate price in intellectual derision. College was once about preparing boys and girls to become men and women, not least through a process of desensitization to discomfiting ideas. 

The semi- and post-literates who overran the humanities departments at most universities long before I ever set foot in college are the main culprits here. Then again, it shouldn't be that hard to figure out what it takes to live in a free country. The ideological brainwashing that takes place on campus isn't (yet) coercive. Mainly, it's just onanistic.

Obviously, you expect as much from a good conservative like Bret Stephens. And yet, when it comes to trigger warnings, writers at the Guardian, hardly a right wing publication, have also sounded a tocsin of alarm.

Jill Filipovic denounced the repressive attitude behind the call for  trigger warnings:

Students should be pushed to defend their ideas and to see the world from a variety of perspectives. Trigger warnings don't just warn students of potentially triggering material; they effectively shut down particular lines of discussion with "that's triggering". Students should – and do – have the right to walk out of any classroom. But students should also accept the challenge of exploring their own beliefs and responding to disagreement. Trigger warnings, of course, don't always shut down that kind of interrogation, but if feminist blogs are any example, they quickly become a way to short-circuit uncomfortable, unpopular or offensive arguments.

Surely, we need to underscore, for the purposes of this blog that trigger warnings are supposed to be therapeutic. They are supposed to shield trauma victims from painful memories.

Writing in The New Republic Jenny Jarvie offered an excellent analysis of what is wrong with the notion:

The trigger warning signals not only the growing precautionary approach to words and ideas in the university, but a wider cultural hypersensitivity to harm and a paranoia about giving offense. And yet, for all the debate about the warnings on campuses and on the Internet, few are grappling with the ramifications for society as a whole.

Most psychological research on P.T.S.D. suggests that, for those who have experienced trauma, "triggers" can be complex and unpredictable, appearing in many forms, from sounds to smells to weather conditions and times of the year. In this sense, anything can be a trigger—a musky cologne, a ditsy pop song, a footprint in the snow. 

For my part I would add that when therapists try to help people to overcome trauma they use exposure to ideas and images associated with the trauma to desensitize them. Protecting trauma victims from anything that they might associate with a trauma causes them more, not less distress. It puts the therapist in league with the abuser.

I believe that the concept of trigger words and images comes down to us from the practice of deconstruction. The argument is too complicated to present in today’s post, but Jarvie has offered a good account of what’s wrong  with this effort to stifle intellectual debate:

One of the problems with the concept of triggering—understanding words as devices that activate a mechanism or cause a situation—is it promotes a rigid, overly deterministic approach to language. There is no rational basis for applying warnings because there is no objective measure of words' potential harm. Of course, words can inspire intense reactions, but they have no intrinsic danger. Two people who have endured similarly painful experiences, from rape to war, can read the same material and respond in wholly different ways. 

More importantly, they reinforce the fear of words by depicting an ever-expanding number of articles and books as dangerous and requiring of regulation. By framing more public spaces, from the Internet to the college classroom, as full of infinite yet ill-defined hazards, trigger warnings encourage us to think of ourselves as more weak and fragile than we really are. 

Trigger warnings are presented as a gesture of empathy, but the irony is they lead only to more solipsism, an over-preoccupation with one’s own feelings—much to the detriment of society as a whole. Structuring public life around the most fragile personal sensitivities will only restrict all of our horizons. Engaging with ideas involves risk, and slapping warnings on them only undermines the principle of intellectual exploration. We cannot anticipate every potential trigger—the world, like the Internet, is too large and unwieldy. But even if we could, why would we want to? Bending the world to accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them.

As it happened, and as has been widely reported, the impetus for trigger warnings comes to us from feminism, or, from the more radical branches of feminism.

Dare I say that I find this somewhat strange? From its inception second wave feminism has actively promoted the explicit discussion and the open exposure of all private matters, especially as they involve the female body and female sexuality. And it has insisted on the exposure of the truth and the horror of sexual shaming, sexual abuse, sexual molestation and rape.

Feminism has held that the patriarchy was repressing female sexuality by hiding it behind veils. And it has added that the patriarchy was covering up sexual crimes against women. It has made it its mission to expose it all to the light of day. It has been at war with feminine modesty.

Should we expect that the highly estimable Jezebel site should now come with a trigger warning? Is there anything that the feminist writers on that site would consider to be too raunchy, too horrifying or too obscene to be exposed to public view?

And it is worth mentioning that literature and the arts used to have an unwritten discretion code. True enough, bad things happen in the Bible and in the Iliad. They do in Shakespeare, too.

And yet, these canonical texts—the ones that students are often advised not to read—never present violent actions merely for the purpose of provoking or inciting the readers.

Since contemporary radicals hate the canon, and have convinced far too many students not to read it. They are left with literary and artistic works that, being unable to evoke civilized emotions mask their mediocrity by including scenes and images that are designed to shock the sensibility of any normal human being.

For the people who promoted this kind of schlock to demand trigger warnings is a very rich irony, indeed.

Down With Ovid; Up With Therapy

It’s getting so bad that even liberal professors are opposing it.

By “it” I mean that current academic mania about attaching trigger warnings to every text that might perhaps slightly hurt the feelings of a delicate student.

In place of trigger warnings they should all adopt Megyn Kelly’s line: “Toughen up, buttercup.”

This time, University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne, stalwart defender of evolution and atheism, has had enough.

Writing in the New Republic, Coyne denounced the Columbia University students who declared that Ovid’s Metamorphosis should contain a trigger warning because it portrays the rape of Persephone, among other horrors. Heck, it even includes the story of Narcissus and Echo.

Evidently, the trigger-warning mania is a stealth assault on the Western literary canon. Taken to its logical limit, it will lead to a college curriculum that is stuffed full of texts that promote the proper ideology.

As you know, the great totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century banned most of the Western canon. They only allowed people to read prescribed and politically correct texts.

And, socialist art was designed to propagate an ideology, not to edify or even to entertain.

The master of the game was Mao Zedong whose Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution forbade students (and everyone else) from reading anything but the little red book of his writings. Under the aegis of his wife, Jiang Qing, leader of the gang of four, people were only allowed to watch and listen to approved artistic artistic productions.

Anyway, Coyne lays out his argument:

 After all, what body of literature, including the Bible and the Muslim hadith, doesn’t mention violence and sexual assault? The Bible even sanctions rape. Should divinity schools put trigger warnings on the Old Testament? I am sorry about the student who couldn’t abide the mention of sexual assault, but she should be getting help for her triggering from a therapist, not from a professor. Without such help, she’ll go through life triggered by every magazine and newspaper she sees.

He continues:

The pathway of such trigger warnings—not just for sexual assault but for violence, bigotry, and racism—will eventually lead to every work of literature being labeled as potentially offensive. There goes the Bible, there goes Dante, there goes Huck Finn (loaded with racism), there goes all the old literature written before we realized that minorities, women, and gays weren’t second-class people. And as for violence and hatred, well, they’re everywhere, for they’re just as much parts of literature as parts of life. Crime and Punishment? Trigger warning: brutal violence against an old woman. The Great Gatsby? Trigger warning: violence against women (remember when Tom Buchanan broke Mrs. Wilson’s nose?). The Inferno? Trigger warning: graphic violence, sodomy, and torture. Dubliners? Trigger warning: pedophilia. 

I have occasionally suggested that the mania about trigger warnings derives from the fact that more than a few professors do not know enough to teach certain canonical texts. Such is academic life.

One must also wonder whether the students who insist on taking all the insalubrious and offensive remarks and actions in great literature personally are really masking their inability to learn from the texts. Worse than that, they are refusing to learn from the great books of Western civilization.

This feels like the logical consequence of an educational establishment that believes, as an article of faith, that pupils and students should relate personally to what they are reading.

In this they are grievously wrong. Students should try to understand what Shakespeare is dramatizing, regardless of whether it falls within the rather limited bounds of their personal experience.

If you think that the story of Persephone is a feminist parable, you will have missed the point. If you believe that Romeo and Juliet is an adolescent love story, you will have diminished Shakespeare’s text.

As Coyne astutely points out, being hypersensitive to offense will limit you to hearing only thoughts that echo your own. Is there a better definition of narcissism?

In the end, anybody can claim offense or triggering about anything: liberals about conservative politics, pacifists against violence, women against sexism, minorities against bigotry, Jews against anti-Semitism, Muslims against any mention of Israel, creationists against evolution, religionists against atheism, and so on.

And he is quite right to see it all as part of the imperialistic encroachment of the therapy culture. It’s almost as though the educational establishment has gotten in the business of producing more psychotherapy customers.

Coyne offers a cogent analysis:

But the core [curriculum] is not a form of therapy; it’s a form of exposure to diverse ideas, and it should not have the aim of making people feel “safe.” In fact, that’s precisely the opposite of its aim. 

It’s time for students to learn that Life is Triggering. Once they leave college, they’ll be constantly exposed to views that challenge or offend them. There are a lot of jerks out there, and no matter what your politics are, a lot of people will have the opposite view. If you’re an atheist, you’ll live in a world of people whom you see as hostile and delusional believers. If you’re a believer, you’ll encounter vociferous heathens like me. If you’re a feminist, well, sexism is alive and well.

That’s why one of college’s most important functions is to learn how to hear and deal with challenging ideas. Cocooning oneself in a Big Safe Space for four years gets it exactly backwards. “Safety” has been transformed by colleges from “protection from physical harm” to “protection from disturbing ideas.”

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.

The War Against Free Expression

Recently, Smith College held an alumnae forum on free speech. Defending the now-quaint notion was former ACLU board member, Wendy Kaminer.

Kaminer argued in favor of the proposition, which is inscribed in American jurisprudence that hateful, offensive speech must be allowed in the public square.

For her efforts she was denounced as a racist.

A Harvey Silverglate explains, Kaminer’s vigorous defense of free speech quickly ran afoul of the modern tendency to protect the delicate sensibilities of students from any potential traumatizing words.

Thus, the advent of what are called trigger warnings:

Trigger/Content Warnings: Racism/racial slurs, abelist slurs, anti-Semitic language, anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language, anti-immigrant language, sexist/misogynistic slurs, references to race-based violence.

He adds:

Smith is not the epicenter of hostility to free speech. On university campuses nationwide we are witnessing an increasing tide of trigger warnings. They are popping up on syllabi, in discussions of public art, and even finding their way into official school policies.

On Oct. 27, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology circulated a survey questionnaire to its entire student body on the issue of sexual assault—a so-called “climate survey” to try to determine and expose the extent of the problem at the school. Remarkably enough, the survey itself came accompanied by, guess what:

“TRIGGER WARNING: Some of the questions in this survey use explicit language, including anatomical names of body parts and specific behaviors to ask about sexual situations. This survey also asks about sexual assault and other forms of sexual violence which may be upsetting. Resources for support will be available on every page of the survey, should you need them.”

None of this is really news.

But now, we see a far more chilling assault on freedom of expression coming from Great Britain by way of Theresa May, home secretary in David Cameron’s conservative government.

Underscore the fact that May’s efforts to censor speech are coming from the British right, not the left.

Brendan O’Neill outlines the nightmare proposal:

In Britain, if you have extreme views on anything from Western democracy to women's role in public life, you might soon require a licence from the government before you can speak in public. Seriously.

Nearly 350 years after us Brits abolished the licensing of the press, whereby every publisher had to get the blessing of the government before he could press and promote his ideas, a new system of licensing is being proposed. And it's one which, incredibly, is even more tyrannical than yesteryear's press licensing since it would extend to individuals, too, potentially forbidding ordinary citizens from opening their gobs in public without officialdom's say-so.

It's the brainchild of Theresa May, the Home Secretary in David Cameron's government. May wants to introduce"extremism disruption orders", which, yes, are as terrifyingly authoritarian as they sound.

Last month, May unveiled her ambition to "eliminate extremism in all its forms." Whether you're a neo-Nazi or an Islamist, or just someone who says things which betray, in May's words, a lack of "respect for the rule of law" and "respect for minorities", then you could be served with an extremism disruption order (EDO).

If, perchance you are branded an extremist by the government, you will need police permission before expressing an opinion in public:

Once served with an EDO, you will be banned from publishing on the Internet, speaking in a public forum, or appearing on TV. To say something online, including just tweeting or posting on Facebook, you will need the permission of the police. There will bea "requirement to submit to the police in advance any proposed publication on the web, social media or print." That is, you will effectively need a licence from the state to speak, to publish, even to tweet, just as writers and poets did in the 1600s before the licensing of the press was swept away and modern, enlightened Britain was born (or so we thought).

Obviously, this does not merely aim at speech that incites violence or terrorism. It can easily be extended to any and all politically incorrect thinking. And it will apply to any speech that would, in some American universities elicit a trigger warning:

As one newspaper report sums it up, the aim is "to catch not just those who spread or incite hatred," but anyone who indulges in "harmful activities" that could cause "public disorder" or "alarm or distress" or a "threat to the functioning of democracy." (By "harmful activities", the government really means "harmful words"—there's that Orwellian slip again.) This is such a cynically flabby definition of extremism that it could cover any form of impassioned, angry political or moral speech, much of which regularly causes "alarm or distress" to some of the people who hear it.

But, wouldn’t this policy apply to all those who evince Islamophobia by speaking ill of Islam and to those who do not accept gay marriage?

What the government is proposing is the punishment of thought crimes, plain and simple. Its insistence that officialdom must now move beyond policing violence and incitements to violence and start clamping down on hotheaded, "harmful" speech that simply distresses people is about colonising the world of thought, of speech, of mere intellectual interaction between individuals—spheres officialdom has no business in policing….

May's proposal to set up a system of licensing for speech, essentially to provide a license to those who respect British values and deny it to those who don't, is the ugly, authoritarian endpoint to the mad obsession with hate speech that has enveloped much of the Western world in recent years.

The Preemptive Apology

Here is yet another reason why you should never, ever send your child to a prestigious American liberal arts college. Such places used to be the crown jewels of the American educational establishment. Now they are indoctrination mills, implanting ideologically driven stupidities in the minds of their students. How better to render these students dysfunctional. Serious students around the world are working on artificial intelligence. Students at American liberal arts colleges are learning about the three dozen different gender identities… and the moral imperative to ban plastic straws.

Just in case you are new to this blog, you should be aware of the fact that this mis-education is being done in the name of therapy. Schools are no longer dedicated to education, to preparing students to take their place in the world, to fostering excellence. They are obsessed with the dire necessity to provide non-stop twenty-four hour therapy. 

Thus, they coddle their students, most especially by offering trigger warnings whenever said student might be exposed to something distressing, something that would dismay his delicate sensibility. Of course, that must include nearly all of world literature and religious teaching… but,whatever.

In truth, researchers have studied trigger warnings. They have discovered that trigger warnings are useless in helping any student to overcome the residual effects of trauma.

As for the current therapy culture on campus, it results from labelling the nation an organized criminal conspiracy that abuses and harasses all minority groups, and even majority groups. To be a member in good standing of the oppressed classes you must embrace your status as traumatically dysfunctional. Or else, you must do constant penance for being a member of a privileged class.

Besides, we know already that the best treatment for trauma is gradual desensitization through gradual exposure. Shielding people from anything that might elicit a bad reaction makes them more, not less, vulnerable to triggers. After all, it’s not just images of similar events that trigger traumatic responses. It might be the color of someone’s hair, their name, their attire… whatever. 

Anyway, the imbeciles who are running very liberal colleges have now lured their students in the practice of what is called the preemptive apology. The woman who writes this letter-- I assume it’s a woman, because if it isn’t, things are a lot worse than I think-- attends a liberal college, presumably a place like Sarah Lawrence or Brown. She is writing because the currently woke practice of preemptive apology makes no sense to her.

So she writes to Miss Manners, a sign that, for her at least, all is not lost.

Here is the letter:

I attend a very liberal college, and many of my classmates are passionate about decreasing the taboo surrounding mental illness. While I support this cause in spirit, I'm bothered by some of its symptoms.

Specifically, many of my peers apologize preemptively for future slights. Typically, a classmate will say something along the lines of, "I'm sorry if I'm rude to you today; I'm dealing with a depressive episode."

I recognize that nobody is perfect and would certainly forgive someone who apologized after being gruff. But a preemptive apology often leaves me uncertain that my peer is even planning to try to regulate his or her behavior. I also feel that any regret is insincere: Because the apologizer has yet to hurt me, I don't think he or she can possibly acknowledge the pain I (might) feel.

Am I right to be put off, or should I catch up to the times? Is there an appropriate way to express my displeasure with such an apology without seeming to judge a friend's struggles with mental health?

Note the consequence of making college into a therapy factory. Students announce their weakened emotional state, up front, and pretend that it’s an excuse for bad behavior. And they have no confidence that they will be able to control their bad behavior, they apologize in advance. As a sidelight, awareness of one's mental health condition has no effect on one's ability to function effectively in the world.

We note that these students are being told to define themselves by their mental illness, and to announce it to the world. When you tell someone you are depressed he is more likely to avoid you, or to feel sorry for you. Both of which will aggravate your depression.

As for the idiot notion that this is going to decrease the taboo around mental illness, the thought is too stupid to take seriously. In truth, when people take pride in being depressed they become moral degenerates. Taking pride in failure is precisely the wrong way to treat mental illness.

As for the notion that there mental illness is stigmatized, nothing could be further from the truth. There is far too much discussion of mental illness and probably far too much medication being prescribed. Our culture seems to have gone into the business of producing mental illness. It's being led by the pharmaceutical industry, since it alone is profiting from this nonsense.

The person who makes a preemptive apology is saying that he cannot trust himself to control his behavior. His manners are so bad that he cannot count on them under stress. He is making a preemptive excuse. The apology grants him license to behave badly. Nothing more or less.

As it happens, the letter writer has more sense than her peers. She understands that an apology can only be offered sincerely after offense has been given. You apologize after you fail, not before you fail. If you apologize preemptively you are setting yourself up for failure and inviting friends to see you as a pathetic buffoon. And, of course, as the letter writer continues, an apology offered before the fact cannot possibly be sincere. Credit her for understanding that the value of an apology lies in its sincerity… 

She understands that a sincere apology means that the individual has taken responsibility for his actions, that he is not going to blame it on his mental illness. If his depressive state is making him do it, he is saying that his apology is neither sincere nor meaningful. He is simply shifting the blame.

Second, when you apologize you are vowing not to repeat the offensive or the bad behavior. Being as the apology is an assertion that you do not want the behavior to define your character, you can show that it is not who you are by not doing it again. If you believe that apologizing preemptively will allow you to offend with impunity, you have missed the point of apology.

So, my plaudits for the letter writer. She should immediately transfer to a school that is not inhabited by fools and flakes.

As for Miss Manners, she offers up the following response, dripping with appropriate irony. When someone apologizes preemptively, you should say this:

“I am so sorry. How lucky, at least, that you know in advance when you’re going to offend. I’m not sure that I am able to do that, so please forgive me if I accidentally take offense.”