Trigger Happy
16th December 2021
The science is in, but don’t expect that to change anything. According to at least 17 recent studies, trigger warnings — those advisories posted ahead of content some readers may find distressing — not only fail to alleviate suffering in the emotionally disturbed but may actually induce greater trauma in those individuals.
There are, to date, no studies that indicate trigger warnings work to their intended purpose. They were dreamed up in the 1970s after psychologists began to diagnose a new condition, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in Vietnam War vets. But trigger warnings only reached popular consciousness in the 2010s, when feminist blogs used them ahead of content about sexual violence. You may not like feminist blogs, or sexual violence either, but that at least seems well-intentioned. Although less than 4 percent of the US population has received a PTSD diagnosis, and that number is probably much lower for students, the warnings soon became ubiquitous on college campus texts — so much so that ‘trigger warning’ has become a reliable way of mocking a generation seen as coddled, weak and hypersensitive.