You could say that the other way. Quite a lot people pay no mind.
I’ve looked. There are no stats I can find in my remedial search techniques. I wish I knew some. Be interesting to know.
If you are bothered by trigger warnings, then yes, you are probably overly sensitive.
I did, actually. I said (to phrase it a bit differently) that quite a lot of people don’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that quite a lot of people do.
I don’t have any stats, either. But I don’t think it’s a “majority rules” situation – even if the ones who read the labels are significantly fewer than those who don’t, there’s still quite a lot of us.
Agreed. Having thought it over, I think my compromise would be having content notes for explicit content, for example a warning if a book or TV show contains a graphic depiction of rape, or a book that deals heavily with the subject. But we wouldn’t use it for everything.
But that would not help everyone. There isn’t a solution that helps everyone. The question is which approach causes the least amount of harm and that’s where many seem to differ.
I routinely encounter triggers at my job. Our Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners have no concept of TMI because they are so inured to it. So it’s not uncommon for me to get a graphic and detailed medical report of sexual assault or domestic violence when requesting a case study for reporting. I can’t very well say, “Hey, I didn’t need to know all this” when they encounter those situations every day. Truly some of the stuff that’s come out of that department still haunts my dreams. I just realized I had to either find a way to cope or get a new job, and I didn’t want the latter, so I worked really hard on the former. Part of getting good therapy is learning how to take care of yourself when you encounter a trigger.
Which is why I’m not 100% certain where the therapeutic process ends and personal preferences begin. One of the hallmarks of PTSD is avoidance of triggers. That is the dysfunctional part, it is the disorder itself. So obviously, therapeutically, we want to move away from that. But that doesn’t necessarily mean every trauma survivor should throw themselves willy nilly into every triggering situation. They have to first develop the skills to cope. And that can be a lifelong process.
So while I do lean to the side of “this is probably harmful” when it comes to trigger warnings, I recognize that what it looks like at the individual level could be very different from person to person.
Well, sure. I agree with you.
Where do we draw the line? Maybe there’s 4 people with a very bad allergy to XYZ chemical in, maybe, 12 different products. Do we make a label that may distract from, or obscure the label warning a thousand
people rat poison is also produced in this manufacturer? Which presumably is more dangerous?
Just paint the rat with a 
on it.
I chose my words carefully, perhaps for reasons that may not be immediately clear. EVERY person who appears before me CLAIMS to be disabled. However, by the standard I am required to apply, not every claimant IS in fact disabled. My impression - based on considerable experience - is that SOME percentage of people exaggerate the severity of their symptoms, whether intentionally or not.
And, all claimants before me are seeking disability benefits - which qualify as financial gain.
I guess I’m not sure what you mean by exaggerate their symptoms. My understanding, and I’m no expert by any means, is that disability claims require medical documentation. I guess this is another thread, but personally, I think there should be such a thing as part-time disability. There are a lot of chronic conditions that make full time work impossible but not impossible to do no work at all. I imagine a lot of people in that in-between place are financially desperate enough to exaggerate their symptoms to try to get their head above water.
There have been times in my life when I’ve been unable to work, times where I’ve been only able to work part-time, and times I’ve been able to hold a full-time job. I don’t know if this is particular to psychiatric disorders but the severity isn’t static, it is better at times and worse at other times. There is no real place in the working world for people like this.
If having some form of PTSD is seen as part of someone’s identity, do trigger warnings serve, in part, as a way for them to have that identity validated?
There is intermittent FMLA. That’s what I had for my severe migraines.
The problem is not so much in needing the time off - if I am only capable of working 20 hours a week due to my disability there are plenty of part-time jobs looking for someone to work 20 hours a week. The problem is that most of those 20 hour a week jobs don’t pay well enough to support a person - and you can’t get disability benefits if you earn more than a certain amount of money. Depending on the benefit, there may be a trial work period but if you earn more that the earnings limit for a certain amount of time, you will lose the benefit. Even if you earn only $1 per month more than the limit. It’s a disincentive to working.
This is another reason why job-sharing is such a good idea. Wish they’d given more support to the idea.
I’d say that’s the working theory. It has been established that identification as a trauma survivor is correlated with poorer mental health outcomes, but it could be that you are more likely to identify as such if you are more profoundly affected by your trauma. I’d have to look further into the research.
I definitely identify as a trauma survivor, but it’s hard not to when trauma informs so much of your life. Despite great progress generally, I have specific ingrained issues caused by PTSD that decades of therapy have been unable to resolve. I’m not completely hopeless, but I’m currently doing hard, scary work and it feels incredibly daunting given how deeply entrenched some of those issues have become. I don’t know that I need a trigger warning to be reminded that I have PTSD. I definitely don’t need my identity validated, though I did in my early years, so I’m aware that’s a thing.
All of which is to say, there is a lot more to why you would identify as a trauma survivor than whether or not trigger warnings exist.
Newsflash - IME, every great once in a while, people lie. And I have not heard of anything showing that having been diagnosed with a physical or mental condition automatically converts someone to being completely truthful.
IMO&E some people (certainly not all) perceive some benefit to be derived from claiming to be more sensitive and less capable than they actually are.
To be completely fair to people who are bothered by trigger warnings, I can sometimes sympathise a little bit - because there are people out there demanding accommodation when what they are really seeking is attention - for example some nonzero, and I think, significant fraction of all of the comments on the internet that say “OMG this is triggering my OCD” are from people who probably don’t have OCD, and certainly not a diagnosis of it.
It’s not right for people to look at those probably frivolous cases and hastily generalise that all claims for accommodation of triggers are just from overly sensitive fusspots but that is, sometimes, how people arrive at that conclusion.
Yeah, I really don’t know what you mean. Of course some people lie, but some people are genuinely debilitated by mental illness - how do you determine one from the other? Hopefully by a thorough and comprehensive understanding of mental health conditions. I’d be happy to discuss this in some future thread on the subject.
I don’t think accommodation claims are from (only) overly sensitive fusspots, I think PTSD is a serious mental health condition that should be treated with the best available evidence. Given the research, maybe it’s more likely that trigger warnings are useless than actively harmful, but the general attitude that people need protection from distressing thoughts and feelings is ubiquitous in our culture, and in my opinion, deeply damaging to mental health. We certainly can’t claim it’s made mental health better, because the stats are pretty bleak.
I still use content notes myself in certain contexts, because you can’t omit them these days without looking like an asshole. I don’t mean that lightly. I want people to feel safe around me.
When I was in college, I attended a local theater play Floating Rhoda by Eve Ensler. I was surprised by some distressing content, and managed to flee the theater and lock myself in the bathroom before I had a full-scale wailing breakdown. Something about that moment had tapped into profound grief and pain that had to be dealt with then and there. When I was done crying, I opened the door and there was a small crowd gathered, waiting for me, including the director of the play who apologized to me personally and promised next time there would be a trigger warning. I was mortified.
I don’t know if a trigger warning would have helped anything. The problem wasn’t the play, it was the litany of shitty things that had happened to me and it would be a long road of recovery ahead of me, a road I’m still walking, and maybe it doesn’t end – not for me, not for many people. We want to point to this external thing that caused us to feel this way, but what caused us to feel this way is inside of us, and until that is addressed, the world is always going to be a dangerous place.
I don’t like the term “triggered”
I feel the pain of some people who experience an awful reaction to a play or movie, because of past trauma. I do.
I have had traumatic events in my life to the point I am mostly mute.
I don’t “trigger” though. That says to me “shot out of there like a bullet”
I think and overthink later. Then I decide I shouldn’t have had to see, hear or go through that. It was usually my fault I was there. (If not a medical thing)
I can’t change this. I’ve tried. I’m determined it’s not gonna cause any issues with people around me. I can’t scream out and say “No!” anyway.
The problem is not is there people with these problems. We know there is. The problem is not whether people lie about it. We know that happens.
The problem is whether there is too much ease in an otherwise non-traumatized person to assume they are “triggered” by something they see. For what ever reason they choose to do it. The world is aware there is this new thing and I can be special because I can say something bothered me to the point I was incapacitated.
Very young children are being labeled troubled, traumatized and in some way a problem. They’re are not helping these kids. They are accommodating that label. If that.
Putting an unruly child in a quiet room to think about what they did is not teaching the kid to learn to deal with the problem. I would’ve spent that time figuring out ways to make someone pay. And stewed til I was good and mad. Luckily I wasn’t an unruly kid.
If I had been, my Daddy may have traumatized me further that night. Telling him someone triggered me wouldn’t have been acceptable. I would have been punished. (He was a drill instructor in the Marines. I’ll leave it to you to decide what his parenting methods may have been.)
This world is oversensitive to these things. It’s allover social media. It’s allover the school and work place. Families are accommodating Uncle Pete’s weirdness is ways that no family should. He has a responsibility to try and assimilate, if he can’t he should stay home if he’s afraid of his reaction.
There are times when we need to help a distressed person and a time when we need to ignore them as just too precious to be out in the world.
It’s easy: if you can’t deal, don’t go. If you wanna go see a scary movie, you know they bother you, and you get to the warnings and triggers credits you’ve gone too far already.
Make better choices. It’s your responsibility to care for your mental health, as an adult. Not some movie producers.
ETA: if you really do have PTSD or mental health problems from trauma, of course it’s never your fault. There’s help for you. Get out there and find it.
FWIW, I just reviewed the diagnostic criteria for PTSD in the DSM-V, and the word “trigger” does not appear there once.
The closest it gets is adverse reactions to external or internal “cues.”
Avoidance behavior is however clearly spelled out as characteristic of the disorder. It even gets its own subheading.
Everyone loves to talk about their trauma because when you’re dealing with something shitty, attention is a nice consolation prize. And therapists love to talk about trauma because it looks big and deep and complex. Trauma really captures the imagination of the populace for some reason. They see it as this interesting and mysterious thing. I blame Freud.
But under the hood, it’s really no different than other types of anxiety.
PTSD is not what happened to me. It’s how I think about what happened to me, how my memory processed what happened to me, and how I behave in response to what happened to me.
The great news is, all of those things can be changed.
The bad news is, it’s really hard.
‘Triggered’ is experiencing the same sort of lexical arc as many a slur word - starts out being just a factual descriptor, gets abused and over-used, becomes a slur, gets replaced by something else that will eventually suffer the same fate.
It’s not easy; I think you’re oversimplifying it. How do people know how they can’t deal unless what they are dealing with is described?
‘Make choices’ is a great idea, but the menu needs to be clear.
There’s a lot of good discussion in this thread that I agree with (from all angles… this is less than a simple question), but two quotes that seem vital to me are:
[quote=“Spice_Weasel”]
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.[/quote]
Just because someone (or a group of loud someones) ask for something doesn’t mean it’s healthy, helpful, or useful.
In this and many other social issues, we often get trapped in behaviors and accommodations that feel like they help, and may even receive subjective feedback that they do help, and resist any analysis that questions whether it’s really the case.
No one wants to be the person who says “thing X that makes you feel good is actually not good for you long term,” particularly if someone is just looking for a little relief moment to moment.
Add in the complexity around the fact that probably for some subset of people the accommodation (like trigger warnings) are truly helpful and it’s a big mess.