Being triggered is good for you

The arguments around trigger warnings tend to relate either to psychology or cultural politics.

Starting with the science, advocates argue that trigger warnings are important for protecting trauma victims from episodes of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The case that kicked the movement off was a rape victim triggered by a class discussion of Ovid’s metamorphosis.

The first thing to note in this context is that PTSD is extremely rare, even among trauma victims. As Harvard psychology professor Richard McNally recently explained in the New York Times:

Epidemiological studies show that many people are exposed to trauma in their lives, and most have transient stress symptoms. But only a minority fails to recover, thereby developing PTSD. Students with PTSD are those mostly likely to have adverse emotional reactions to curricular material, not those with trauma histories whose acute stress responses have dissipated.

Given this knowledge, it seems relevant to consider how many people exposed to material with trigger warnings are likely to have PTSD, how frequently reading said material would trigger PTSD, and how severe these episodes would be. Is the harm averted by trigger warnings greater than the benefits of not having them?

For conciseness, I will mention only one argument in favour of a more raucous university environment: anti-fragility (for more arguments, see Psychology Professor Jonathan Haidt’s YouTube lecture on Coddling-U versus Strengthening-U). Bone is anti-fragile—if you treat it gently, it will get brittle and break; you need to pressure it. Human psychology is the same. People who are not exposed to triggers and challenges develop into anxiety and depression-prone individuals.

Perhaps more importantly from a harm minimisation perspective, it turns out that avoidance of triggers is counter-therapeutic. Consider the following from Fleurkens et al’s study of sexual trauma victims:

Avoidance is a maladaptive control strategy… trauma-focused treatments stress the role of avoidance in the maintenance of PTSD...Prolonged exposure to safe but anxiety-provoking trauma-related stimuli is considered a treatment of choice for PTSD.

I can’t think of a much better example of ‘safe but anxiety-provoking trauma-related stimuli’ than reading Ovid in a class of literature majors.

There is an important counterargument to be made here, namely, you do not give someone psychotherapy without their consent. Yet this surely applies to trigger warnings, not their absence. For hundreds of years universities, like most of society, were sans trigger warning until someone thought they were necessary for the psychological health of some students. It is trigger warnings that are the non-consensual psychotherapy. 

As a compromise, one could argue that if a university sends you a letter explaining that everything at university might be triggering, as Chicago recently did, and you attend anyway, then you have given consent. The language of Chicago’s letter was chest-thumping, but it seems an otherwise sensible policy, and one that I would be in favour of the ANU adopting. 

That the costs of trigger warnings outweigh the benefits is a liberal argument grounded in classical utilitarianism. This moral paradigm argues that social justice is whatever arrangement maximises total welfare, which is derived by adding up the utility of each individual.

Trigger warning advocates are usually not utilitarian. This is where the cultural politics comes in.

Advocates are instead typically operating what public choice theorists call a Rawlsian social welfare function. They define “justice” as the maximisation of the utility of the worst-off person in society, even if it means disproportionately reducing the utility of everyone else.

To a Rawlsian, no matter how much utility is lost by the ‘privileged’ students at university who don’t have PTSD, it doesn’t outweigh the utility gained by the few ‘oppressed’ students who benefit from trigger warnings.

Classical utilitarianism and Rawlsian/Marxist paradigms are irreconcilable. So whether trigger warnings preponderate will ultimately depend on the values of students, and whether universities can specialise to cater to diverse consumer groups.

Such catering is already happening in America, notably at Bowdoin College of Sombrero-party fame, but can’t happen in Australia because our market is small and our system public. So all you moderates, if you value the free flow of ideas, make your preferences known.

A version of this article was originally published in Woroni, the student newspaper of The Australian National University. 

Edit (postscript 06/10/2016): Many of the articles in Woroni were about the need to call TWs 'content warnings' instead (most of these took the value of TWs for granted, which I thought kind of defeated the point of a for-against discussion). An argument frequently made in favour was that we have content warnings on things like Irreversible (a movie that graphically depicts rape) and scenes of disasters and shootings on the news. This strikes me as duplicitous (a moat and bailey fallacy, in fact). The dispute about trigger warnings has always been about the breadth of their application, not about the potential appropriateness of a content warning. There is a meaningful difference between Irreversible and Ovid's Metamorphosis. There is also a meaningful difference in the potential to trigger of a severed limb versus reading about Nazi ideology, yet advocates would like to see both carry warnings. It was odd in this context that one article suggested slippery slope arguments against TWs are invalid. Articles about online dating now include TWs for 'gendered language', and the language of safety employed in TWs is currently used to attempt bans on Trump advocacy at US colleges. We are already at the bottom of the slope! It staggers me that advocates don't see how this language could easily be turned around and used against Sanders, Stein or some such at a right-leaning university like Baylor.