I think trigger warnings are (or should be) context dependent. In a college-level literature class, I think there shouldn't be trigger warnings on anything, really. My undergraduate institution was pretty good about that. One particular theory professor I had would go on tangents about virtually every "sensitive" subject under the sun, whether that was rape, racism, politics, pornography...you name it. So far as I'm aware, he never received a complaint, as it was all contextualized -- it could all be related back to literary theory in some sense.
Last week I circulated that Atlantic article to a few colleagues who specialize in academic writing -- rhet/comp particularly. One of them is utterly against trigger warnings, and the Atlantic article meshed perfectly with his teaching M.O. Mine too, come to that. Again, in academic contexts, I think trigger warnings are generally unnecessary and tend to create sensitivities where analytics are preferable.
In other contexts, however, I can see the need for trigger warnings. I don't think they're necessary in workshop poems at the 'Sphere. And, I should point out, they're not actually required in the header -- I caught a bit of heat for adding one in TDE a year or so ago when I was under the impression that header warnings were required. A thorough reading through the guidelines reveal that they're not. But sometimes there are things that I really don't want to see or read. Things that have a deeply unsettling impact on me that I would like a warning for. For instance: last year one of my "Facebook friends" posted a link that showed a picture of a toddler -- no older than three years old -- with her head caved in by some munition of some kind. The look of anguish in her father's eyes as he was holding her, combined with the sheer horror of the situation literally traumatized me. It's hard to express on an Internet forum that I have a strong constitution and wouldn't throw the term "traumatized" around casually, but suffice it to say that it created afterimages for me, and I would wake up and see the picture before my eyes... Had the story not led with a horrific graphic picture, and instead said "Israeli Toddler Killed by Mortar -- WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES," you can be assured that I wouldn't have looked at it.
There's a school of thought that maintains that seeing or reading disturbing things is good, because it provokes a response, and hopefully, a reaction. But I don't think that's the case very often in legitimate real-world scenarios. Atrocities are perpetrated every hour of every day worldwide, and there has to be some filter (self-imposed or otherwise) for us to effectively cope in an arguably violent world.
Again, as in most things, context is key.
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