[ross hamilton hill]

I don't think you can wrap life in cotton wool, I doubt if avoiding 'triggers' is helpful to those trying to cope with PTSD.
Michael's initial examples are almost bizarre, University should be a place where youth confronts and tries to understand the dreadful realities of life that childhood is shielded from.
I am still haunted by watching the last interview with Ted Bundy, seen at Uni, I sometimes wish I hadn't watched this interview with a notorious serial killer, but on the other hand it taught me a great deal about how normal evil can appear, Ted Bundy was intelligent and handsome, it was only for a split second that the mask dropped and the monster within revealed itself.
The idea that you can avoid these aspects of life, rape, child murder, torture, etc is absurd.

[Jayne Osborn]

Well said, Ross.

Whilst I am totally sympathetic to anyone's suffering, whether you call it PTSD or something else... life has to be lived, and we all have to learn to deal with the unsavoury aspects of it.

Added in: I was a victim of sexual abuse as a child, but any mention of the subject doesn't traumatise me all over again. I don't require a "trigger warning" every time I read something about it. It happened; I can't change that, but I can ''pigeon-hole'' it - and get on with my life, being happy with the good bits, in the meantime.

[Julie Steiner]

Always they must see these things and hear them
--Wilfred Owen, "Mental Cases"

[Edited to say: Sorry to hear that you were a victim of childhood sexual abuse, too, and very glad to hear you don't have PTSD flashbacks to it. I do to mine. But everybody's different.]

[Edited again to add: I think the question of whether trigger warnings (or strong language warnings) are appropriate in a college classroom is a very different question than whether such warnings are appropriate in this forum, in which no one's grade is penalized for not being able to participate in a discussion that feels too personal, and our emotional reactions are only public if we choose to make them so.]

[Jayne Osborn]

I'm really sorry that you still suffer, Julie. I do have flashbacks - of course I do, from time to time, but I have loved my life for the most part, ...so far!

The man who was responsible for abusing me is long dead (Yay, I rejoice about that!), so I just don't see the point in letting him have an effect on me, certainly not so that I continue to suffer from his actions. I won't allow the bastard to have any power whatsoever over my life!

That's my way of dealing with it, but I wholly understand that it's not as easy as that for everyone.

Jayne

[Shaun J. Russell]

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.

[Max Goodman]

Trigger warnings in academia and journalism can be harmful. We need to grapple with life's difficulties and feel how others are suffering. College classes and the news should facilitate these things.

When we ask others for help, though, we should be considerate of them. If it occurs to a poet that some of her colleagues might be triggered by something in a workshopped poem, I see no harm in a trigger warning. The worst result is that some may find the warning ridiculous.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Simon, sorry about the misunderstanding but I actually hadn’t read your thread yesterday, so my comment had nothing to do with it. The Atlantic article triggered me. My take on the Alan Watts quote is that he meant to say that the mechanized modern nation-state is straitjacketed by rules and regulations, whether the lawyers are behind it (as Maryann suggests) or not. And that is why I see the quote as relevant to what the Atlantic article talks about. It’s a collective mindset.

Having read Simon’s poem now, my feeling is that while it does explore shadowy areas, it is mild and inoffensive compared to, say, Frank Bidart’s sex-deviant serial-killer poems. And if the Bidart is taught in college courses, as I suppose it must be, I wouldn’t want the course description beforehand, or the professor in the middle of the course, to have to issue any “trigger warnings,” since I assume that anyone old enough to be in college knows that literature can often be dark or disturbing. Why can’t students simply be advised to inquire ahead of time, if they’re concerned a course might have subject matter they’d want to avoid for the time being (a perfectly valid choice)? The onus should be on the students to seek out that information in advance, not on the generally overworked and underpaid teachers.

[Simon Hunt]

Should trigger warnings be mandatory?

--I'd say NO on the principle of free speech, as well as that of intellectual freedom.

Should trigger warnings be prohibited at all times?

--I'd say NO on the same two principles.

Should trigger warnings offered as a courtesy (however unnecessarily or even ridiculously) be publicly criticized?

--With all due respect to Michael Cantor, whom I like, learn from, and respect for (among other reasons) the (trigger warning. Ha!) bullshit-detecting that enhances our collective experience here, I'd say NO based on the logic above and on, like, manners. Would you criticize publicly somebody who held a door for you that you preferred to open yourself or wished you a happy "wrong" winter holiday?

By the way, I was offline for 24 hours to camp with the scouts, so I'm behind on reading and responding to this thread (for which I feel some responsibility) and the original poem-thread. Also, I showed my wife this thread and told her how I created a mini-kerfuffle by deviating from my usual practice. She said, "Duh, you gave a trigger warning because YOU were traumatized by writing the poem [it's true as I described in the poem-thread in a reply to Julie...]. Also, your little computer friends need to lighten up." Sorry, Michael...

[Wintaka]

FWIW, I wonder if those of us who attended university in the 1960s and 1970s see any similarities here. Speaking objectively, I'd say today's students have an ever-so-slight edge in humourlessness but we outpip them in sanctimony.

Colin

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Privilege to not feel pain doesn't exist. True. But the desire to explore ways to at least not add to the pain is hard to fault. I don't find myself triggered by creative writing of any kind. So it would be easy for me to jump on the "too much pussfooting" wagon. But then I remember hearing a bit of this recording that was supposedly a piece of the real life recording of the death by Grizzly of two humans that inspired the end details of Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man. Even Herzog after hearing the tapes suggested they be destroyed and censored the recordings from being used in the movie. There is a power in the combination of actual trauma and technological transportation of that trauma into spaces incongruous with its nature. That tape can infect your soul. I imagine for some people, their lives make them open to that sort of pain from things that I wouldn't even notice. Until I understand the stakes, I would rather be too careful than too certain. I think so, anyway.