alt Hacker NewsThe problem is they are explicitly arguing that all of our best science is that trigger warnings are counter productive for getting better. Just a quick google search of 'scientific support for trigger warnings' will get you all sorts of meta analysis, RCT results, etc. on this. At best they don't seem to actually do anything, and at worst, they actively impede your ability to get better.
That doesn't mean it's a matter of willpower, but it does suggest that avoiding your triggers or trying to use trigger warnings to prepare you for dealing with them provides no benefit. Your use of the word avoid pretty much sums up the core problem here - on a personal enjoyment of day to day life level, avoiding your triggers makes perfect sense. On the long term healing and not being traumatized by them level, you don't want to do that. (Edit: This isn't to say try taking exposure therapy into your own hands and just surround yourself with the stuff. None of this is a replacement for guided therapy. But specifically going out of your way to avoid these things is 'avoidant behavior' and is pretty much universally recognized as being a bad thing when it comes to dealing with PTSD etc.)
That being said, I believe everyone should be able to disclaim what they want and that people can choose how they approach their own self-care, even if it isn't supported by the science.
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Before we had Trigger Warnings as a term, we had movie and game ratings that said what you'd see if you watched/played: violence, blood/gore, nudity ... steam still does this, and as long as you don't use the politically charged TW expression, no-one seems to mind. For example, "Skyrim contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Use of Alcohol, and Language."
"TW 1.0" as I remember it - the first time I heard the TW term - was a thing where professors told students in advance if a lecture contained material that could upset some students, I think it started when someone teaching a course on criminal law in a law degree told students in advance "[TW:] next week we will have the lecture on the law around rape and sexual assault". Properly practiced, that's not exposure therapy that's being polite to your students (though why not put your whole syllabus up at the start of term, if you can?) It was also not intended to let you skip that topic - it's pretty important to know about if you're training in criminal law! - just to let you know in advance when it's coming up.
If you're teaching a course on the history of the British Empire in India, you're at some point going to need to cover the Bengal famine, the Amritsar massacre, the mutiny (aka. first war of independence), the practically-a-civil-war during partition, and a lot of other things. Mind you a "content note: British Empire" at the start of the course would probably cover all bases.
The choice of "trigger" that already means something in therapy was perhaps unfortunate, and nowadays I think "content warning" or even "content note" is preferred.
The real problem though was how students, who were neither trained therapists nor seemed to have consulted any, redefined and enforced their version of TW to the point that the term got tainted in the public view.
Basically, if you have anything like PTSD, you need an actual therapist not the collective hivemind of twitter (instagram these days?).
"it does suggest that avoiding your triggers [...] provides no benefit"
This is the part I'm sceptical of. When I look this up, I mostly find articles like https://theconversation.com/proceed-with-caution-the-trouble... (and the underlying studies), which mainly address the question of whether reading a trigger warning and then consuming the potentially triggering content is better than just consuming the potentially triggering content without a warning.
(The article also mentions a finding that trigger warnings have "no meaningful effect on an individual's [...] avoidance of this content"; but I think that's entirely compatible with a world where most people consume the content regardless of the warning, some are more drawn to it because of the warning, and some (including the few who are truly vulnerable) avoid it because of the warning. The effect on those vulnerable few is what's most relevant here. The article does briefly mention "unhealthy avoidance behaviours", but in the context of one university's opinion and without supporting evidence.)
What's the best evidence against trigger warnings as a means of enabling traumatised people to make an informed decision on when (and whether) to confront their triggers?
> At best they don't seem to actually do anything, and at worst, they actively impede your ability to get better.
No, trigger warnings do not actively impede your ability to get better. That argument rests on random trigger being framed as "exposure therapy like" event. The exposure therapy is not done by random unprepared exposure to the triggering material with no follow up. Nor by random exposure in public setting.
They are a tool like anything else.
Exposure and Response Prevention therapy works. You will never get fully well without exposure. However, it requires that you find stimulus of a magnitude that makes you uncomfortable, but doesn't send you outright spiraling. You need to keep steady while experiencing it for a while.
Content warnings give you the ability to estimate what intensity of negative stimulus you will experience, and this is important when dealing with actual triggers.
Not everyone is yet at the phase where they can handle a certain level of exposure. For some unfortunate cases it takes a long time to be well enough to start being able to handle exposure.
That being said, I do think content warnings need to be specific, not generic. The most useful ones are spoilers, not generic messages to put you on guard. Careful Ao3 authors do a better job at this than most games. There are technical solutions that allow interested parties to get this information without having to spoil the default audience, but we live in a busy world that has a lot of things to care about other than this.