Do classic works of literature need trigger warnings?
Do university students need to be told that novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four or Jane Eyre may distress them? The experts aren’t convinced.
These days even trigger warnings are triggering. A university is discovered to be chaperoning a text with a warning to students that it may “trigger” the memory of past trauma. This triggers the socially conservative, who anxiously conclude that another institution has surrendered to the iron whim of a generation of snowflakes.
Even those of us who try to respect the ebb and flow of cultural mores surely winced when it transpired that the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland had alerted its charges to the news that Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea contained “graphic fishing scenes”.
Scotland lands more than 300,000 tonnes of fish every year. In the novel, after 84 days without a bite, the old man catches one marlin and knocks off a few sharks.
In recent months universities have issued trigger warnings (or, as most prefer, “content notes”) for Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Nineteen Eighty-Four and, predictably, the entire oeuvre of the suddenly problematic JK Rowling.
It is not even an especially new phenomenon. Eight years ago students at the University of California in Santa Barbara demanded the sirens sound for F Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf and, obviously, Shakespeare.
Booktriggerwarnings.com announces cautions for 6701 books, these being listed alphabetically from A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy by Alex White (“cults, death, gore, murder, smoking, violence”) to Zone One by Colson Whitehead (“death, gore, gun violence, violence”).
Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winner has so far failed to make the site’s generous cut; much work clearly lies ahead for its compilers.
As it happens, trigger warnings may be counter-productive. The academic journal Clinical Psychological Science published a study in 2020 suggesting that trigger warnings “have little or no benefit in cushioning the blow of potentially disturbing content”, and sometimes make things worse by “increasing the extent to which people see trauma as central to their identity”. I have more fundamental queries, however. How commonly does a set text “trigger” anything in a student worse than sadness, disquiet, anger or whatever emotion its author intended? Could trigger warnings be a solution for a problem that barely exists?
Robert T. Muller is a therapist and academic at York University in Toronto, and the author of two books on trauma. He explains that the idea of “triggers” came out of 1990s trauma theory, which acknowledged that therapists had underestimated the amount of trauma in the population. Many who presented with, say, eating disorders or depression had, in fact, childhood histories of physical or sexual abuse, and were in reality suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Just as flashbacks could be triggered in Vietnam veterans by Fourth of July fireworks, “a word, an image, a smell, a sensation of some sort, a sound” could plunge abuse survivors into a “heightened awareness of the original trauma”. Sufferers experienced disassociation from their circumstances, or were rendered speechless. Some had the classic panic attack symptoms, such as sweating, hyperventilation and palpitations.
Triggering, Muller says, is a terribly important concept.
So how often, during a lecture, at a seminar or in a library, do students find their PTSD ignited? No one seems to know, and despite our appeals through social media and mental health charities, it is hard to find examples. Perhaps people keep quiet because there is shame attached, or because they fear reliving their attacks by reciting them. Maybe they distrust journalists. Students who have campaigned for trigger warnings at their universities have failed to get back to me. A young woman said she would be happy to talk but didn’t.
Carole Carter did. Now a practising therapist, she studied psychology at the University of Hull. She had been abused by men in her teens, and one was still manipulating her when she arrived in Hull. A lecture on sexual offenders proved particularly hard for her – although she forced herself to sit through it, refusing, as she says, to be defined by her abuse.
“When I get triggered, it’s not outwardly as dramatic as a panic attack. I get my heart racing. My ability to think clearly goes,” she says. The lecture in question was preceded by a warning. Her only complaint, 12 years on, is that the university’s counselling provision was inadequate.
Sophie Ross’s abuse as a child left her with complex PTSD, a diagnosis that carries a longer list of possible symptoms, including difficulties in regulating emotions. She took a BSc in adult nursing in 2014. “I found myself at times being very triggered during discussions around things such as nature v nurture and the sweeping generalisations of what ‘family’ looked like,” she tells me. “I became very angry at times, and at times too emotional to continue with lectures. It affected my attendance.”
Karol Darsa, a Los Angeles trauma psychologist and author of The Trauma Map: Five Steps to Reconnect with Yourself, says one in four students in the US have been sexually abused in college. Teaching a trauma course at Pepperdine University in Malibu, she frequently checked whether anyone had been triggered by her class or needed help outside it. She does not remember any triggering incidents, but it has happened when she was training trauma therapists. Certain videos, she says, brought on “emotional disregulation, anxiety (and) a sense of wanting to check out – some form of disassociation”.
These cases of medical students with personal histories being triggered are proof of triggering as a concept, but they are not what we think of when reading about trigger warnings being issued to literature students.
One academic paper has, however, attempted to assess how common triggering is in arts subjects. Last year’s “Student reactions to traumatic material in literature: Implications for trigger warnings” was conducted by Matthew Kimble of Middlebury College, Vermont, four other psychologists and Cynthia Meyersburg of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a pressure group that defends free speech in education.
In its study 355 undergraduates – 68 per cent female and 32 per cent non-white, some with traumas in their pasts, some with significant PTSD scores – were invited to read a passage describing sexual and physical assault from Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. First given a trigger warning, the students could read it or another, inoffensive, passage from the book. More than 96 per cent chose to read the trigger-warned passage.
“Of those,” the study says, “those with triggering traumas did not report more distress, although those with higher PTSD scores did. Two weeks later, those with trigger traumas and/or PTSD did not report an increase in trauma symptoms as a result of reading the triggering passage.” The authors concluded: “Students with relevant traumas do not avoid triggering material and the effects appear to be brief. Students with PTSD do not report an exacerbation of symptoms two weeks later.”
These findings may surprise Darsa in California and even Muller in Canada, but the latter has a pretty clear idea why trigger warnings are becoming more common on campus than PTSD triggering itself. It is because triggering, a psychiatric term, has been co-opted. “The problem, I think, is the term has been used to mean anything and everything,” Muller said. “Sometimes people say ‘this is my trauma’, they mean, this is stressful, or this is challenging.”
He has no problem with trigger warnings in principle – content warnings have preceded films and plays for years – but he does in practice. “You might think that a book that contains trauma stories will be triggering for people, or that a particular play might be triggering, but that’s not necessarily the case. Triggers are almost always extremely idiosyncratic.”
He reminds me that a smell can be a trigger. “So you can’t really warn people, because people have their own individual triggers, and triggers are odd. They’re unique. One person’s trigger is another person’s – I don’t know – luxury item.”
Now Muller does not dispute that a literary passage may trigger people with a traumatic past. Yet this does not sound much like what Ivana Drdakova, a student association welfare officer at the University of Aberdeen, was talking about last year when students voted for content warnings. “As a literature student, you inevitably come across a piece of literature that contains distressing scenes, for example harm to animals. This is one of the things I do not like to read about,” she told The Times.
Drdakova allowed at least that students would still be exposed to the material. Were, however, trigger warnings to lead to great literature being avoided, it would surely be bad for great literature, and Muller thinks it could be bad for students, even those with reason to be triggered. “A general principle of trauma therapy,” he says, “is that we need to face a cruel past. We cannot simply ignore it. Research has been showing: people who have trauma histories, if they are sheltered from talking about their histories, do not improve.”
The same goes for the histories of nations and races. He acknowledges there is a “true trauma to colonialism” and that texts dealing with it need to be taught through the “lens of understanding”. “As a general rule, talking about uncomfortable ideas is really helpful for people – in fact, I’d say therapeutic. I’d say what college professors have been doing since time immemorial is exactly what we do in psychotherapy, which is helping people think about difficult things.”
Carter thinks there needs to be more emotional support on campus, “but I personally think that learning to deal with your triggers is part and parcel of life”.
Kathy Marshall, a survivor of sexual abuse, wrote the following five years ago in HuffPost. “Avoiding being triggered, though a perfectly human reaction, is like self-medicating with heroin. It will block the pain but it won’t treat the underlying cause, and it certainly won’t be doing any favours for your health in the long term.”
I mention to Darsa that a 40-year-old man I spoke to had watched Spotlight, a 2015 movie about the Boston Globe’s investigation into paedophile priests. It triggered traumatic memories of a sexual assault by a family friend when he was very young. What surprised him was that within a few days he was, for the first time, able to talk to his wife about what had happened and, after her, his mother. “It was actually helpful.”
Darsa sounds surprised. Most people would not respond positively to such a trigger. “It is too destabilising and too scary, and they need to talk about it. You can give warnings, you can suggest people become emotionally prepared. My suggestion is that everybody should have their own therapist.”
If triggering in the medical sense is rare in an academic surrounding, what then is the point of trigger warnings? Perhaps they perform a useful function as expressions of other things: intergenerational respect, cultural awareness, political solidarity, simple empathy? Today’s students are probably more emotionally literate than their predecessors. For some good reasons, they probably do feel more personally about politics – especially the politics of race and gender. What use would a university professor be who was not prepared to meet all that with sympathy?
On the other hand, what is the use of a university professor who does not point out that if your strongly held beliefs leave you feeling vulnerable, avoiding discussing them is not the way to go, and learning how to defend them in debate is. But I am a sixty-something, white, heterosexual man whose university days are decades behind him. Poppy Koronka, who helped to research this piece, is a recent graduate of the University of Edinburgh. She believes trigger warnings are of practical importance. “Without a warning,” she tells me, “entering into a conversation about something traumatic you have personal experience of would be really anxiety-inducing. It’s a bit of a political statement, but I think it is one that may help students with that experience to contribute and engage with the text in a discussion.”
No one we have spoken to disputes that there are huge mental health issues among young people in higher education.
It is time maybe to pay more attention to their psychological welfare, and a little less to the occult power of the written word.
The Times
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