The phrase “trigger warning” is now firmly part of the U.S. vernacular. Especially in online circles and on college campuses.
The term has been widely ridiculed and is most commonly associated with the modern tendency to mollycoddle college students by shielding them from anything they might find objectionable or contrary to their own beliefs.
While there seems to be no formal definition of what it means to ‘trigger’ an individual in the colloquial sense, an Everyday Feminism article by Gillian Brown describes a trigger as something that causes an negative emotional response. A trigger could spur a range of emotions, including — but not limited to — panic, sadness, and fear. A trigger can even impact someone physically by causing shaking or trembling.
So what counts as a ‘trigger?’ That’s where things get tricky. Because a trigger is viewed as a very personalized emotional response, anything that invokes a painful reception can be classified as one. Triggers are commonly associated with post traumatic stress disorder and therefore associated with some sort of distressing experience in the past, but there are those who believe they also can occur without any connection to prior trauma.
The broad concept of triggers can actually be traced back hundreds of years to soldiers returning from battle with what doctors used to call “exhaustion.” It wasn’t until the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, that the phrase “post traumatic stress disorder” began to be associated with the condition. PTSD is now classified as a mental disorder by public health officials, and can develop among anyone who has suffered a traumatic event.
Now some argue that this clinical term has been overused by whining millennials trying to avoid anything they consider offensive or politically incorrect. Students, like those at the University of California in Santa Barbara, have pushed for resolutions that require professors to put trigger warnings on all syllabi, and permit students to skip assignments (without consequences) if they don’t like the subject being studied or consider it offensive.
Most rational people, among them comedian Bill Maher, argue that students instead need to learn to toughen up and instead learn to cope with ideas they find objectionable.