There’s a widespread notion that warning people about impending discussions of distressing topics is a necessary and desirable way of saving them from being “triggered.” Recently, for example, the Student Assembly at Cornell University passed a resolution urging the university to require trigger warnings on a broad range of “traumatic content” in teaching materials. The university quite appropriately rejected this recommendation.

Do these warnings do more good than harm? What kind of “triggering” are they supposed to present? What will their effect be? More and more people are agreeing that on the whole, these warnings aren’t helpful. They can lead to the suppression of discussion of important topics.

The idea is that reading about distressing events may trigger an anxiety response. That’s plausible enough. I’ve experienced such a response watching some movies and TV shows. However, there are problems. One is that the warnings may actually increase people’s tendency to experience anxiety. They can also have a long-term effect from overprotection, as students regularly shielded from distressing material don’t learn to cope with it. It’s well-known that exposing people in careful steps to what they fear is an effective way of treating phobias (or at least it was well-known before “phobia” became an insult). If they never deal with the source of their fear, it won’t get better.

This passage in the Psychology Today article is noteworthy:

The researchers found that being exposed to trigger warnings caused participants to rate both themselves and others as more vulnerable to developing PTSD. Trigger warnings led to no self-reported differences in anxiety between the two groups overall, but for participants who already held the belief that “words cause harm,” trigger warnings led to an increase in anxiety.

If you’re dealing with people who have serious post-traumatic issues, that’s a different matter. It’s best to address them individually, since there’s so much variation in what triggers people. A standardized list of issues to warn about won’t cover everyone, and the manner of presentation can be more important than the topic. There’s a big difference, for instance, between talking about war atrocities statistically and detailing them injury by injury and scream by scream.

The biggest reason a broad policy of trigger warnings is bad is that the easiest way to comply is to avoid the “triggering” topics. This will lead to ignoring subject matter that people need to know about. The Cornell list included “sexual assault, domestic violence, self harm, suicide, child abuse, racial hate crimes, transphobic violence, homophobic harassment, xenophobia.” People need to know that these things happen or have happened. Letting students flee the classroom whenever they come up will just let them pretend they don’t happen.

If you’re posting on social media or a blog, hiding gruesome or NSFW material behind a click is a good idea. But unless your audience has specialized needs, don’t worry much about “triggering.” Putting whole topics behind trigger warnings won’t help anyone. It’s more useful to think about the purpose of your writing and the best way to achieve it. If you want to shock your audience into caring about an issue, graphic details can help. If you’re writing an educational overview, anatomical details usually aren’t necessary. Suiting the style and level of detail to the audience will prevent distress better than trigger warnings will.