I Oppose Censorship - Which is Why I Support Trigger Warnings

I’d like to take this opportunity to wade into the ongoing debate about trigger warnings in college classrooms, and in the process to talk about some tough mental health experiences and the people who deny them.  

During the most recent section of Research Methods in Psychology that I taught, we did a unit on the physiological arousal that can come from being immersed in fictional stories.  I would go on to devote my career to studying the psychological effects of consuming fictional messages, so I had a lot of fun showing the students a clip from Fatal Attraction with boiling kettles, screaming violins, and a nightmare-inducing version of Glenn Close.  However, before I started I said to the class: “This clip has some disturbing stuff in it—violence, self-harm, drowning, things like that.  If anyone would rather not watch it, please let me know because that’s fine.”  No one took me up on the offer, and we went ahead with the class exactly as planned.  (There were a couple great screams from the students when Alex exploded out of that bathtub, and everyone’s heart rate was going nuts on the EKG by the time Beth finally killed her.)  

It literally took me less than ten seconds to trigger-warn the entire class.  My doing so didn’t “spoil” the experience for anyone—I have actual physiological evidence that they were still terrified by the movie scene even after my warning.  Even if someone had taken me up on the offer to opt out of the experience, it would have taken me maybe another 30 seconds to sum up what that person had missed once the student came back.  It was so ridiculously easy for me to trigger-warn my class, the idea of people spending as much effort as they have trying to avoid trigger-warning their classes is, to me, somewhere between laughable and pathetic.

Another important thing to bear in mind as these windbaggy professors come out and claim trigger warnings somehow mollycoddle students: the only reason that trigger warnings are being discussed in college settings and not high school settings is because the most logical alternative to warning about this content is to ban it entirely.  Most high schools (IMHO correctly) make the decision not to allow teachers to show R-rated movies in the classroom, whereas pretty much all colleges allow R-rated content without question.  If I had been teaching high schoolers rather than college students, there is no way that I would have been allowed to show them the scene from Fatal Attraction, and with good reason.  Most college students are legal adults; most high school students are not.  Most college students have enough frontal lobe development to be able to interrogate some of the messages they encounter in fiction; many high school students are unusually subject to narrative persuasion.  High schoolers’ parents are likely to protest any experiences they fear are overly disturbing for their children; college students are expected to advocate for themselves.  

Therefore, the use of the warning itself was what enabled me to introduce the potentially-disturbing content into the classroom at all.  If I had simply started the clip with no mention of what the students were about to see, then any one of them would have been able to argue, with good reason, that I was resorting to shock tactics and in the process creating a hostile learning environment.  However, I gave them the ability to make an informed decision about whether or not to stay and watch, and in the process allowed for more adult content to enter the classroom.  

In my mind, trigger warnings are like turn signals: they require a negligible amount of effort on the part of the user, but can save everyone who isn’t the user an enormous amount of stress, alarm, danger, and potentially even serious injury.  Anyone who has driven both in areas where everyone uses turn signals all the time and in areas where most drivers’ turn signal use is spotty or even incorrect (*cough* Maryland *cough*) knows that it is just so much smoother driving around when you know what your fellow drivers are up to and can trust them to warn you before they make turns.  In areas where you can’t know for sure where exactly that tractor-trailer across the four-way stop from you is going to go, or whether that green sedan to your left on the highway is going to come into your lane without warning... Well, many aspects of driving become unnecessarily obnoxious at best, and literally life-threatening at worst.  

Trigger warnings, like turn signals, take infinitesimal effort to use.  Trigger warnings, like turn signals, are considered common courtesy for a reason.  Trigger warnings, like turn signals, can have enormous negative impact on everyone around a particular individual if the individual fails to use them.  Trigger warnings, like turn signals, can make entire complex systems of human interaction operate more smoothly and with less potential for hidden danger.

The other thing that people screaming themselves hoarse about not wanting to use trigger warnings (who I secretly hope are going to look to history like all the people who wrote entire essays whining about how they didn’t waaaaaaannnnna use life-saving seatbelts because seatbelts are aaaaannnooooying) seem to forget is that trigger warnings are already in use all over the place right now.  Concert venues post little signs informing ticket-holders any time there will be flashing strobe lights that might cause seizures for epileptic people.  Amusement park rides that involve enough rough motion that they might harm riders who are pregnant or suffering from heart disease always have signs out front mentioning that that’s the case.  Movies that might give nightmares to small children mark themselves PG-13, so that parents can make an informed decision about whether their kids should watch that material.  Areas of dolphin shows that splash people with cold water have signs indicating which seats will get wet, so that people with oxygen tanks or even just silk clothes can stay away.  Some of these measures are driven by legal considerations; some are just courteous.  None of them take the users more than a few minutes or a few dollars to implement.

On the other side of the coin, the cost for not using these warnings has the potential to be much higher than ten seconds of speaking or one paper sign.  When people refer to being “triggered,” they are not talking about having seen something they consider gross, or offensive, or startling, or anger-inducing.  They are talking about traumatic flashbacks that entail vividly reliving the worst moments of their lives.  Or they are talking about a panic attack, the worst-possible alarm state that the body goes into when it thinks it is dying.  Or they are talking about very specific and very dangerous mental distress reactions such as relapsing into drug use, engaging in self-injury, bingeing and purging, or even committing suicide.  

The only time I’ve ever been triggered by the content of a class, I was attending a defensive driving course necessary to be certified to use a university rental car for a conference.  The instructor, for God-knows-what reason, actually made a joke about a car accident that had taken the life of a student at our college a few months before, during the class discussion of texting and driving.  The driver was not texting at the time, and even if he had been that would not have made the instructor’s comment in any way acceptable.  The only reason I knew he definitely wasn’t texting was that two of the students in the car at the time were my housemates, and the other two were friends.  The driver was killed, and two of the passengers suffered life-changing injuries.  

After the instructor made what probably felt like a one-off comment from his point of view, I spent the entire rest of the 90-minute class frozen in place.  I couldn’t bring myself to continue listening to the lecture or taking notes, because my entire body was so numb I couldn’t seem to do anything with it.  I had that sleep-paralysis feeling of being unable even to control my own breathing, but I barely even noticed my own body at the time because my mind was completely detached from it.  My body was in such an intense state of shock and horror that it was behaving like I was under threat to my life.  I don’t know how long I would have sat there if some guy from the class (who I suspect realized I was distressed and was trying to check on me) stopped to complement an AC/DC sticker on my phone case and tell me briefly about his own fondness for hard rock.  He gave me the necessary grounding to stand up, walk out of the room, and go spend the next half-hour sobbing on the floor of the bathroom.  That reaction didn’t occur because I was offended.  It didn’t happen because I was grossed out.  It wasn’t a matter of me disagreeing with the instructor, or being angry or hurt that that comment was made.  Those reactions (and the ways that triggers are often minimized into similar reactions) are not even in the same ballpark as what happened.  

Trigger warnings are not about sparing students from anything that might ever worry or annoy or anger them.  They are about ensuring that students can be safely exposed to that kind of material, through doing one’s darndest to ensure that that material doesn’t destroy anyone’s emotional state in the process of worrying or annoying or angering them.  

Often the effects of exposing students to that kind of content are wider-reaching than just forcing them to consider uncomfortable material.  I have a friend who works in a psychology lab studying the factors that police can use to interrogate suspects in ways that will result in guilty parties confessing and—more importantly—prevent innocent parties from giving coerced confessions.  One way they study these effects is through accusing research participants of crimes they did not commit, shouting at the participants, berating and insulting the participants, and sometimes even reducing the participants to tears... all of which they can only safely do because they explicitly warn the participants in advance: parts of what you’re about to experience will be stressful and maybe even frightening.  Leave now if you’d like, or leave at any point during the study if you become too uncomfortable.  After all, the psychological researchers are there to learn, and hopefully to make the world a better place through helping the police convict criminals.  Not to destroy their research participants’ lives.  Their research wouldn’t be ethical without the warnings.  The same principle should apply to classroom material.

The people such as the University of Chicago administrators (who, by the way, openly admit that they oppose student safety and apparently see no problem at all with publicly expressing that view) seem to believe that the use of trigger warnings would exclude classroom discussion of problematic material.  In fact, trigger warnings facilitate classroom discussion of problematic material, through ensuring that such discussions won’t end in students who have very specific reasons for needing to avoid very specific types of material suffering horrific consequences from such discussions.  As the online story writers say, “This has [insert potentially problematic content here]—if you don’t like, don’t read.”  Only in this case professors should take ten seconds (have I mentioned that it’s ridiculously easy to do?) and say to their students “this class is going to discuss [warning]—if you can’t safely do so, don’t stay.”  

Censorship, by contrast, would be about ensuring that the content of college classes never offends anyone.  It would entail banning 95% of the books published before 1975 (and at least 50% of the ones published after) for being sexist and racist.  It would mean that psychologists couldn’t study what causes people to jump at scary movies, or to cheat on difficult tests, or to confess to crimes they didn’t commit.  It would mean that current events classes couldn’t touch on, well, just about anything.  It would mean that college students would get a single, cooshy picture of a world in which everything is okay and nothing bad ever happens.  It would probably result in educators banning both discussions of scientifically-verified history (which can be distressing for some Christian students) and discussions of creationism (which can be distressing for some students who aren’t Christian).  

The way the battle is going right now, I predict that it’s only a matter of time before a student sues a college for discrimination on the grounds that the college failed to accommodate a serious phobia through refusing to warn about the presence of that phobia in classroom material, and thereby created a hostile learning environment for individuals with anxiety disorders.  I don’t know where the battle will go from there, but the whole fight can easily be forestalled by professors taking literally ten seconds during the introduction to certain types of class material to mention potentially-problematic content.  Have I mentioned how unbelievably easy it is to trigger-warn students?   

In lieu of going with either the lawsuit extreme or the censorship extreme, let’s instead take advantage of the infrastructure that’s already in place to help students with disabilities and make a few tiny adaptations to include mental health as well as physical health.  There is already, by law, a line in every college syllabus stating that individuals with disabilities will always be accommodated in ways that try to make sure they have an approximately equivalent learning experience to their non-disabled peers.  Let’s add in one more line mentioning that students have the opportunity to ask their professors at the beginning of the semester for warnings about specific types of content, with the expectation that the professors are legally required to comply with those requests.  Notice that I say professors are required to warn students about the material, not to exclude it.  

What happens after the warning is issued will be negotiated between the professor and the student, exactly the way it is now with physical and learning-related disabilities.  Any reasonably competent professor will already have a few make-up assignments available for students to use in case of any kind of emergency, and can simply give one of those to any student who has to opt out of an assignment either because the assignment involves driving on a closed course and the student is legally blind, or because the assignment involves driving on a closed course and the student is too severely claustrophobic to use a car.  Is there still a risk that the system will be abused?  Yes.  Is the risk severely mitigated by the requirement that all students do an equivalent amount of work regardless of accommodations?  Probably.  (I know I keep saying this, but it deserves repeating: the people who claim they are “triggered” by things like classmates disagreeing with them are the appropriation equivalent of The Office’s Michael Scott claiming he’s “disabled” because he slightly burned his foot on a grill.)  

Trigger warnings, of course, are not perfect.  Many individuals struggling with trauma don’t even know for sure that something will trigger them, until suddenly they smell the brand of body spray their mugger used and discover the excruciatingly-hard way that that is a stimulus tied to a panic response in their brains now.  Trigger warnings can’t protect students from sexist or ableist or callous professors.  A trigger warning wouldn’t have protected me from the jerkwad of an instructor who somehow thought it was okay to victim-blame a student who had recently passed away when talking to an audience of that student’s peers.  

But then, no one’s claiming that universal correct use of turn signals would miraculously prevent all car accidents.  Most states have laws requiring their use anyway, because not using them is far more dangerous.  

I would recommend having all professors mention briefly at the beginning of the relevant class if course material is going to involve violence, gore, or sexual aggression.  I’d also recommend giving the students the opportunity to request any additional warnings.  I don’t know if that list is exhaustive or accurate or even in the right direction, but there needs to be conversation about what the standard warnings should be.  There needs to be discussion of making accommodations for emotional as well as physical health.  None of that is happening right now, because it’s mostly an argument between indignant teachers who see any attempt to extract even this tiny courtesy from them as excessive control and individuals who are desperately trying to be taken seriously when they say they just want to be able to learn without their mental health being put on the line.  

So, to sum up, we’re talking about asking professors to take one or two minuscule steps (throwing one sentence into their lectures and/or their syllabi) to prevent serious and lasting harm to their students that discriminates based on emotional health... and the professors are the ones screaming that their freedoms are being restricted by the draconian request that they take an extra ten seconds of their day to protect their students.  And yet somehow it’s the people asking for the warnings who are “entitled” or “delicate.”  Yeah, that makes sense.  

In the meantime I’ll be over here, signaling before I turn left and signaling before I scare the pants off my students with Glenn Close’s interpretation of a stab-happy stalker.  Please take ten seconds of your time and join me, because it’s not about you.  It’s about making the world a little easier for everyone to navigate, one warning at a time.  

—Bug