Trigger warnings are more important than spoiler warnings, so why are they more controversial?

A common concern is that trigger warnings aren’t effective. From his survey of the literature referenced above, McNally concludes that “[t]rigger warnings are designed to help survivors avoid reminders of their trauma, thereby preventing emotional discomfort.” He continues, “Conversely, systematic exposure to triggers and the memories they provoke is the most effective means of overcoming the disorder.”

McNally’s mistake here is twofold: first, trigger warnings aren’t designed to avoid trauma, though it allows for it; rather, advocates of trigger warnings stress that trigger warnings allow students enough warning to prepare themselves and engage with traumatic materials on their own terms. Second, the idea that trigger warnings don’t work because exposure is a successful way to treat PTSD misses the key fact that exposure therapy, not exposure full stop, is a successful treatment for PTSD. Exposure therapy, as described by the study that McNally cites, includes “psychoeducation, breathing retraining, and relaxation, in addition to exposure.” There’s no evidence at all that exposure alone, be it in class or during a course reading, would help treat PTSD. In fact, a trigger warning provides exactly the kind of opportunity someone might need to prepare in order for exposure to be helpful. Trigger warnings are only counterproductive if we fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of trigger warnings and the nature of exposure therapy.

Even more, there’s a double standard at play, here—we don’t demand evidence that spoiler warnings work before deciding whether Gawker should put a spoiler warning at the top of a discussion of the most recent episode of Game of Thrones. In fact, there’s good evidence that spoiler warnings are actually counterproductive. A 2011 study in the journal Psychological Scienceshowed that spoiling the ending of a short passage actually made readers enjoy the story more across several genres. The authors explored this finding even more a few years later, and their findings suggest that spoilers make stories easier to read and they follow more intuitively, and this increases enjoyment (it’s an effect called “processing fluency”). It’s hard to imagine that these findings would comfort anyone who had an upcoming twist spoiled for them, though, and it doesn’t make spoiling someone any less thoughtless.

Like most moral disagreements, though, it’s obvious that this debate isn’t about whether freshman English students should get advanced warning that they’re about to read about rape. Even some critics of trigger warnings support such measures, so long as you don’t actually name them for what they are. In Jerry Coyne’s essay above, he wrote without irony that the Columbia professor teaching Ovid “might have mentioned beforehand that there is violence and sexual assault in Ovid, but that’s as far as [Coyne would] go.” That’s as far as there is to go, of course, and there’s nothing in the op-ed he rails against to suggest the students at Columbia want to go any further.

We can’t put a trigger warning on everything, but that doesn’t mean we can’t provide them for the most likely culprits of the most harmful cases. It’s true that not all victims of sexual violence need or want trigger warnings, but it’s unacceptable for hand-wringing reactionaries to create so hostile a climate that even asking for them gets survivors lumped in with fascists and book-banners who don’t realize that, as Coyne suggests,“life is triggering.” I suspect victims of PTSD may have figured that out by now.