Some Readers May Want To Look Away

The suggestion that you’re about to be exposed to something unpleasant can actually make it worse.

- Marc Wilson

Trigger warnings have been in the news recently. A New York Times headline, for instance, asks, “Should art come with trigger warnings?”, Forbes magazine declares, “Trigger warnings perpetuate victimhood”, and the West Australian reports, “UWA’s student guild bids to introduce class ‘trigger warning’”.

According to urbandictionary.com (chosen to help me make a point), a trigger warning is “a warning before showing something that could cause a PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] reaction”. The crowdsourced site then goes on to disparage the idea entirely.

Although I’m going to express some ambivalence about the utility of trigger warnings, I don’t want to disparage PTSD. It is a real and distressing condition. What we now call PTSD has gone by other names, such as “nostalgia” (used by American Civil War soldiers) and “shell shock” (coined in World War I). PTSD is not, however, solely the experience of people who see combat.