Are we overly sensitive?

Great Debates
61

If there aren’t any labels, how do you decide what’s safe for you, any more than anybody else can?

If you no longer need to read the label on something because you already know what it says, that’s fine. [ETA: though sometimes the large print is the same and the small print has changed. Why did that tuna taste funny to me? Oh. The small print said that’s not all tuna, part of it’s hydrolized vegetable protein. That particular change seems to have gone away; but they tried it for a while.] If you don’t care about what the label says because you don’t mind anything that’s in there, that’s also fine. Nobody’s trying to make the decision for you. That’s what the labels are for, so you (and everybody else) can make the decision for yourself!

If some peoples’ decision is not to read the labels, that’s also up to them. Taking away the labels because some people won’t read them is IMO absurd. Other people do.

The people who hunt my place follow the regs. Most hunters around here do. Your place is your place, I don’t know what happens there.

There’s a chilling effect on the ability of food processors to fill the food up with sawdust, because they’d have to put it on the label, and then people wouldn’t buy it.

If people don’t want to buy extremely violent or extremely sexual material, you appear to be suggesting that they should be forced to do so by sneaking it into material advertised as if it were something they did want to buy.

How can you know, if there’s no label on anything?

62

As a creator of audiovisual content, sensitivity and trigger warnings are a minefield for me. On the one hand, I want to make my content as accessible and comfortable as possible, and when you consider any particular single trigger issue in isolation, it seems like it should be a no-brainer that a trigger warning is just simple courtesy, so it should be done.

Trouble is, there are a lot of them, and it’s often impractical to try to accommodate all of them that are present to some degree or other; at an absurd extreme for example, if so many potential triggers are present that the first 5 minutes of the content is just a series of ostensibly helpful trigger warnings and disclaimers, nobody will watch - there’s no point making the thing.

So I try to strike a reasonable balance.
Firstly if there is something that could cause people tangible harm such as flashing or strobing images, which can trigger photosensitive epilepsy, I think it’s essential to give sufficient advance warning that anyone affected will have ample time to react and so the trigger warning will be prominent

Nextly, if there’s anything that I happen to know is a significant phobia trigger like arachnophobia or trypophobia, and it features very significantly in the video - like if it’s a nature documentary which will feature a lot of closeups of spiders, or B roll closeups of crumpets being buttered, I’ll try to put a trigger warning on the screen - usually less prominently than above - like maybe a text overlay that shows while the main business of the content is still happening alongside.
However, if it’s just a thing that happens quite briefly - like I walk past a hedge that has a spider on it, I don’t generally bother with any warnings.

Furthermore, if it’s a thing that should have been utterly obvious to the viewer before they ever made the decision to watch, I don’t always bother with any warning; examples of that might be:
The title of the video is “Let’s Take a Close Look at Spiders”. Arachnophobes can take the title as their warning.
The video is clearly about, say, ‘Tasting the Crunchiest Snacks’. People with misphonia related to eating noises should expect that it will include some eating noises, and be sensible enough to avoid it for themselves.

Finally, I’m not omniscient; I take reasonable steps to try to keep informed about things that might be a problem, but once in a while, something will slip past me and it’s not always possible to retroactively fix it, but I’ll do my best with the tools available to me.

This policy does attract criticism from people who tell me the warnings are unnecessary or annoying - interestingly, the one I get most often is people saying the flickering lights warning was unnecessary, because they personally found the warning more annoying than the flickering lights.

63

It’s the over processed, over packaged food products that are the problem. I know I can eat a banana. I know banana pudding will have extra sugar and no telling what else in it.

You can’t lean on the label and hope it saves you.
It’s a crutch. I don’t think people pay attention or even read them at all.

BTW, I wash all my fruit in water from my well. I know insecticides are used in farming. No label told me that.

ETA, I’m not totally against labelling. New diabetics and other health diagnosis ’ need to learn. I just think a person should not expect the corporate bigwigs to care what the hell they avail themselves of.

64

ISTM there is so far we can take the analogy of media content warning vs. consumable products content labels – and that there is a difference between merely labeling in general vs. providing warning because of a specific risk the casual user may not really have considered.

Or people will just speedrun the warnings and disclaimers like they do the Terms Of Use w/o really paying attention, and then be upset anyway when what you warned about happens.

But really I do tend to agree with Mangetout’s take on content warning.

65

It’s common among people with who hold their own intelligence in high esteem to assume a negative correlation between sensitivity and intelligence.

Too much science fiction I guess.

66

There is a related toxic masculinity angle - sort of: I am very smart and strong and complete and resilient and I have to continually assert this by contrast with things I consider weak or inferior

67

Yep, that actually happens quite frequently - not so much with triggers, but with other kinds of preface where I felt the need to explain myself; people skip the explanation, then demand an explanation.

68

Oh, boy, do I have a lot of thoughts on this! I have lived with PTSD to some extent for well over twenty years. For most of that time I have been in relentless pursuit of improving my situation through evidence-based living - which requires determining what is BS and what’s actually supported by research. When it comes to trauma, people, including many self-proclaimed experts have such a messed up understanding of what PTSD is and what perpetuates it.

The short answer is: exposure is the #1 most effective treatment for anxiety (including PTSD.)

Now the context of that exposure is another question entirely. Obviously for prolonged exposure therapy you would want to be in the care of a trained professional because (and I’ve done it) that shit is intense. One aspect we worked on was in vivo exposure, which included the kind of material that garners content warnings. Are people to seek out in vivo exposure on their own? That is the question.

At any rate, content notes and content warnings are really one of those psychobabble things that aren’t supported by evidence.

Helping or Harming? The Effects of Trigger Warnings on Individuals with Trauma Histories.

We found no evidence that trigger warnings were helpful for trauma survivors, for participants who self-reported a posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis, or for participants who qualified for probable PTSD, even when survivors’ trauma matched the passages’ content. We found substantial evidence that trigger warnings countertherapeutically reinforce survivors’ view of their trauma as central to their identity. Regarding replication hypotheses, the evidence was either ambiguous or substantially favored the hypothesis that trigger warnings have no effect. In summary, we found that trigger warnings are not helpful for trauma survivors.

A Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy of Trigger Warnings, Content Warnings and Content Notes

Overall, we found that warnings had no effect on affective responses to negative material or on educational outcomes. However, warnings reliably increased anticipatory affect.

And there is evidence to support the argument that trigger warnings are actually harmful.

Worryingly, the researchers discovered that trigger warnings seem to increase the extent to which people see trauma as central to their identity, which can worsen the impact of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the long run.

Unfortunately, the idea that trauma survivors deserve content warnings, whether or not they are helpful or harmful, has completely taken over how media operates. As a writer who writes about many traumatic things, I’m not sure I could get away with not having one without pissing off a lot of people.

Have I been blindsided? Yeah. I recently picked up a book called Lotería which is a compendium of mostly supernatural horror stories. What I did not expect is that in some of those stories, the “horror” is sexual enslavement or sexual violence. Just BAM! There it is. What to do? Well, I put the book down. I know by now how to take care of myself.

The reality is that the things that ended up causing the most severe triggers were in no way predictable. For some reason the end of Ex-Machina triggered an extreme reaction from me, even though I’ve never been betrayed by an Android.

So actually I do think they are more than silly, I think they are most likely actively harmful by endorsing the belief that trauma survivors are more fragile than they actually are, and I think they are also “othering” as the research suggests that that trauma identity can become all-consuming to the sufferer’s own detriment.

I also think they are here to stay.

69

I’d like to offer up a passage that came before what you quoted in that first link:

We conducted a preregistered replication and extension of a previous experiment. Trauma survivors (N = 451) were randomly assigned to either receive or not to receive trigger warnings before reading passages from world literature.

This, to me, is extremely weird.

At best.

If we invoke the analogy, again, of food labeling, I wouldn’t expect a dramatic difference in outcomes between those with severe peanut allergy who did and those who did not read the food label before eating the snack that had peanuts in it.

What I would expect, however, is a different outcome between those who read the food label, and then chose to avoid eating that snack.

If a warning label informs somebody who then chooses to not watch a certain program, how much did the label itself ‘traumatize’ them vs. how much would watching the show with/without the label have traumatized them?

The label offers an informed choice about whether or not to consume the thing – media or food.

That, to me, seems a much more salient question.

70

From the meta-analysis:

Findings on avoidance were mixed, suggesting either that warnings have no effect on engagement with material or that they increased engagement with negative material under specific circumstances.

All signs point to harm, from my POV.

And FWIW I’ve never not engaged with something because of a trigger warning.

What I have done is actively seek out specific information about something. “Yeah, I get it’s violent, but what kind of violent? Does it depict torture?”

A trigger warning, about, say, sexual assault is incredibly vague. Does it mention sexual assault? Does a character talk about a previous assault? Is an assault in real time implied? Does it show someone getting groped? Or is it a graphic depiction of rape?

These warnings are so vague I could never make meaningful decisions by them.

PTSD isn’t like allergies where just a little bit of something is equally distressing as a lot of something.

My current WIP has two trauma survivors: one who was a victim of torture and rape in prison, and the other who was a victim of intimate partner violence twenty years earlier. Aside from action story generic violence, no assault or graphic depictions of assault take place. It’s all very much subtext with the emphasis being on how this effects the way two people relate to each other emotionally.

Does this deserve a trigger warning? Do I need to put that blurb on the back of my book? How about poverty or death or war or all the other issues the book deals with? Why are sexual assault and domestic violence special?

71

The meta-analysis also really doesn’t answer the question that I think matters most.

We all agree that warning labels do not rob us of our agency. The question is whether they can reduce harm, by how much, and at what cost.

Who uses the warning as a reason to watch something else?

IMHO, there doesn’t have to be a perfect equivalence between trauma and a peanut allergy in order for the central question to have value.

72

I don’t think everyone in the world should change how we do things to cater to the emotional needs of a select few types of survivors. I think doing that is damaging psychologically to the individual, and a bad precedent to set for society in general. Resiliency is critical to emotional well-being.

I’ve seen no evidence that they reduce harm in any way.

IMHO, there doesn’t have to be a perfect equivalence between trauma and a peanut allergy in order for the central question to have value.

I agree with you in general, but in this case I’m making a really important point that the food label analogy fails to address: how can I, as a survivor of multiple traumas, with a unique set of triggers, use these vague content warnings as a decision-making tool?

I’ve seen warnings for even mentioning sexual assault. It’s absurd.

73

This speaks to my basic point:

Content and trigger warnings give information about the content of material prior to receiving it. Different typologies of content warnings have emerged across multiple sectors, including health, social media, education and entertainment. Benefits arising from their use are contested, with recent empirical evidence from educational sectors suggesting they may raise anxiety and reinforce the centrality of trauma experience to identity, whilst benefits relate to increased individual agency in making informed decisions about engaging with content.

[bolding added]

74

I respect what you say. How common do you believe your view is within the population of anxiety/PTSD sufferers?

IME, it is not uncommon to encounter people who present themselves as tremendously fragile. But in my work involving disability benefits, I encounter only a limited population of people with emotional difficulties - those claiming “otherness” in pursuit of financial gain.

75

The good news is that you certainly don’t have to. As far as I am aware, they are no laws forcing you personally to change how to interact with people.

76

I understand what you are trying to highlight but I don’t think the benefits are as strong as people think. I would have to see a comparison study between people choosing not to engage based on a trigger warning and people who used their agency to stop or discontinue engagement when something unexpected came up.

The thing is, I make informed decisions about engagement with content all the time, without a warning.

Here are some examples within the last month:

  • A “Behind the Bastards” podcast featuring an episode on Caligula. I can tell that one’s not for me. I don’t play it
  • Another episode of “Behind the Bastards” which I thought would be a fun cult episode turned out to be about violent child abuse. Turned that one off when it became clear which direction it was turning.
  • Lotería features a short horror story where a fifteen year old girl is sold into sexual slavery. I put the book down. I think, “How am I feeling about this right now?” Well, the writing isn’t very good, so it’s not as disturbing as it might be if it were being written by a more skilled writer. I pick the book up (grudgingly, it’s mediocre) and read some more. I come across another depiction, this one of attempted rape. Am I going to keep reading or not? I haven’t decided yet. Probably not. I can deal with a single incident but if this is going to be a theme, I’d rather not.
  • I’ve been dithering over whether or not to read Sandman because of the sexual violence. After watching the TV series and being mostly okay with it, I inquired to a friend about what’s different between the movie and the book, and was informed the book “is worse.”

Just based on personal experience, I feel way more agency now than I ever did putting a giant red X over any mention of sexual assault or abuse. I have gained, through experimentation with different types of material, the ability to know what’s genuinely going to upset me and what will be uncomfortable but manageable.

I never claimed we had to. I said “should we?” This is a moral question. Some people seem to feel it’s a moral imperative. I don’t think it is because we have evidence that it’s useless at best and actively harmful at worst. But as someone who does create content I am left in a very unhappy position, because I am a compassionate person but forgoing content warning labels on your content is regarded as thoughtless at best. So what do I do? Do I run the risk of alienating my fellow trauma survivors? Or do I engage in a behavior that might actually make their trauma worse? Does the benefit of connecting with other survivors outweigh the relatively minor harm of one more content label? To be clear - this is an ongoing debate in literary circles and there is no easy answer.

I’d say it’s very uncommon, which is a problem.

The thing to keep in mind about the people you encounter is not that they are “presenting themselves as tremendously fragile” in pursuit of “financial gain.” These are individuals who are incredibly fragile. Even with the best psychiatric care it can take years to recover your mental health, but in reality these people probably don’t have the best psychiatric care. They are left with whatever the system is giving them, and if they have no money, what’s available to them is not very good. While there are strong evidence-based interventions for PTSD, they are often expensive and hard to find, they are, as in the case of prolonged exposure, extremely difficult and time-consuming, and there are many practitioners out there who are treating their patients in a manner that is likely making their situation worse. In my opinion, when it comes to severe psychiatric illness, the onus is on the practitioner to use the best available evidence, and if they aren’t doing that, well, the patient can hardly be blamed. People can’t be expected to fix broken limbs on their own, likewise psychiatric disorders require the proper support and guidance.

Spouse Weasel’s specialization is OCD and anxiety-related tic disorders, but with few exceptions, anxiety is anxiety. I think we came to the same conclusion more or less independently, but something has gone seriously wrong with how anxiety is dealt with in this country. There is ongoing debate about whether the skyrocketing rates of anxiety disorders is causal or correlational, but if I had to put money down, I’d say misguided social attitudes toward anxiety are making it worse.

77

Ok, if you think it’s harmful then don’t give in and post your content without warnings. It seems like you do think you have the answer: if you personally don’t need it then no one else should either.

78

I’ve heard of students wanting trigger warnings in law school classes that deal with the law regarding sexual assault, and someone who thought a writer should have provided a trigger warning for those with eating disorders regarding the use of the phrase “throw up” that wasn’t even being used literally to refer to vomiting. ( Some policy or rule made the author “want to throw up” ). I’m not saying this sort of thing is common ( I don’t know ) What I am sure of is that this sort of request happens sometimes and it’s absurd. A law student taking a criminal law class shouldn’t need to be warned that there will be some mention of sexual assault in a class about the type of law that is used to prosecute sexual assaults.

79

Kicking it around with other authors, we thought of a few different ideas about how to approach it.

  1. Include help lines/information at the beginning of the book.
  2. Write the blurb in such a way that the content is implied. The language you use to describe your story can give a lot of information about the type of story about to be read.
  3. Include a general note (potentially disturbing themes etc) and then at the back of the book have more specific information, e.g., “death of a pet”, p. 26.)

Another data point here is that romance writers who include trigger warnings in their blurbs run the risk of being automatically categorized by Amazon as erotic fiction, which is hard to get out of.

80

I read labels. I pay attention to labels. Quite a lot of people do. The fact that quite a lot of other people don’t doesn’t mean that nobody, or almost nobody, does.