If there’s something potentially upsetting in an article, video, academic paper, classroom lecture, or movie, someone, somewhere wants to slap a “trigger warning” in front of it these days. But where did these touchy-feely alerts come from?
Believe it or not, there was once a sound idea hiding beneath all the PC-speak that now surrounds trigger warnings.
Let’s start with that first word: “Trigger.” The concept is based on the psychological theory of “trauma triggers,” which emerged in the middle-to-late 20th century in connection with the treatment of war veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, particularly after Vietnam. “Triggers” were described as things seen, felt, or heard that force the patient to recall or relive a personal trauma and prompt painful autonomous responses (fight-or-flight, panic attacks, etc).
While triggers can be direct depictions or descriptions similar to the subject’s experience, they are just as often otherwise innocuous words, sounds, objects, songs, and even smells. For a veteran suffering from PTSD, a trigger could be the first 10 minutes of Saving Private Ryan or the sound of a car backfiring.
The accepted prescription here is monitored isolation from those triggers followed by careful and supervised confrontation of the traumatic memory and the things that forced the subject to relive it—protection then exposure.
Despite trauma’s personal nature, it is possible to make reasonable guesses about what could be a trigger. Teaching a novel with a depiction of rape such as A Clockwork Orange? It’s a good bet that some students who have survived rape (or simply have a triggering fear of it) could have a PTSD-associated reaction. A class-wide heads up or “course content warning” might not be such a bad idea.
This would all be fine if our psychology-laced, post-‘70s national dialogue didn’t encourage everyone to diagnose and prescribe treatment for themselves, no matter how ill-informed. The helpful post-Vietnam discussions (and fears) of PTSD got the ball rolling on this. Unfortunately, it was followed by dubious overprotective, parent-tailored child-psychology movements, patient-led therapies, and even worse self-help trends.
After all that psychobabble, we were empowered to define a “trauma trigger” as anything that caused political, social, and cultural offense (or just made us queasy) and began throwing “trigger warnings” in front anything that might, just might, do the same.
With universities now attended and run by two generations who grew up with this mindset, it’s little wonder that many now require warnings in front of potentially triggering classes or reading material and allow students to opt out of them. Even many liberal educators and analysts believe that these students are prescribing themselves protection without the hard work of exposure, never getting “better” and never learning.
And so, part of a system designed to treat personal suffering developed into a perfect excuse not to attend a history class on the Spanish Conquest of South America. Funny how that works.
