The Coddling Of The American Mind (Trigger Warning Article In The Atlantic...)

Right, and no-one is saying you shouldn't.

I feel like a goddamn college professor should be a better writer than high-school graduate me,

I should introduce you to recently published academic writing

x-post students in that class kind of were

I think TWs are necessary if you're teaching an intro class required by students from all kinds of majors, but at some point, when you've decided to go into the humanities, you're going to have to deal with art/ideas that doesn't comfort you/reflect your ideals.

― Why because she True and Interesting (President Keyes), Wednesday, October 21, 2015 2:52 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but... no... this is really the main roadblock for me, everyone conflating the trigger warning issue with all this other shit -- censorship, protesting against certain public speakers, the mythical coddling epidemic that prevents young people from being 'exposed' to art/ideas -- when it has nothing to do with any of it? they're just being grouped together because i guess people assume the same exact students are arguing for all of these things for the same exact reason? trigger warnings are about accessibility for disabled students. they exist for people with ptsd. just like 1staethyr posted like... ten posts up, trigger warnings are for people who have in all likelihood been exposed to the content at hand far more than the person teaching it. they exist to allow disabled students access to content on terms that they have some degree of control over. if you're going to file that under "not dealing with art/ideas that don't comfort [them]/reflect [their] ideals" then idk

honestly as far as i can tell people who are against TWs in academia, in any capacity, either:

a. don't really understand what trigger warnings are or how ptsd works
b. don't believe ptsd is a disability
c. don't believe accommodations should be made for students with disabilities
d. don't believe students when they (or their doctors) say they have ptsd

or a fun mix of all all of them

the students in the article who were doing a fairly good job of conflating a bunch of different things--objecting to showing negative portrayals of black people (in films by black directors) because the non-AAS majors would be turned into racists by them, demanding detailed TWs in a course whose name was a TW in itself.

but thnx for the self-righteousness. It's the first time I've encountered it on ILE

Trigger warnings are definitely advocated by ppl looking to push a certain ideology. They also have a legit function as a reasonable accommodation for students with ptsd. Both things are true. Schools should be judicious about when and why they use TWs, they shouldn't discard the concept altogether of, alternately, use them whenever ppl demand them

There was that case at wellesley where the statue of a sleepwalker was declared triggering bc some students felt he looked like a rapist. That was dumb

keep on bringing up those extreme examples that represent nothing relevant

They represent the fact that the concept has the potential to be abused. I'm pro trigger warnings when the goal is to protect trauma victims from unnecessary distress. I'm against the language of ptsd being used irresponsibly

the students in the article who were doing a fairly good job of conflating a bunch of different things--objecting to showing negative portrayals of black people (in films by black directors) because the non-AAS majors would be turned into racists by them, demanding detailed TWs in a course whose name was a TW in itself.

― Why because she True and Interesting (President Keyes), Wednesday, October 21, 2015 10:01 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thing is, that article is doing a boatload of conflating itself. barely any of her examples had anything to do with trigger warnings. even the part where she explicitly points them out, the end result is... the class having disagreements? it's one thing if you don't agree with certain students or enjoy how they communicate, but almost every example she gives is just... students having a discussion in a discussion class. she basically says "i used SO many trigger warnings, and they responded by calmly discussing the material in a way i didn't want"

the AAS student wasn't demanding trigger warnings, she was -- and this is being extremely ungenerous to a person who's already being presented in the worst possible light -- demanding a change in the way the class is directed. again, agree all you want with the writer, but TWs played no part in that, and there's no reason to assume they were without saying "crying students demanding things are all basically demanding the same thing at all times". it's a similar line of thinking as her "conservative students also refuse to engage in content for completely different reasons... you don't want to be a conservative, do you now?"

what you're left with is an instance of two students responding viscerally to content (in a way that i guess is assumed to be performative?) and one individual student who got emotional raising a stink, like that has never been a thing that happens in college. and an entire paragraph whining about the tremendous effort it takes to write an email before class (in response to a completely legitimate and common request).

it isn't any different than the other panic-inducing articles, it just includes a paragraph about being kind in between the usual examples of modern students being horrible little monsters and several paragraphs reaching for the same bs reasons to say that trauma survivors are wrong for not wanting to be triggered in class. and i'd bet if she were being paid by the click that paragraph about being nice would be the first one cut

and jesus i don't even wanna touch that last bizarre attempt at a point

I mean I imagine teaching SSBAS has always been really hard.

So as an article asking "how the hell do I teach this stuff" it is interesting.

And I think the question: "Is it harder to teach this stuff than in the past" is also interesting.

But also "my students are frustrating and lazy and full of lazy ideas" is sort of... the point of teaching in the humanities? Like if they weren't like that they could go and read all sorts of stuff and figure it out on their own.

i was totally frustrating and lazy and full of lazy ideas when i was that age. which is why i dropped out of college and spent decades figuring it out on my own.

I think that really hits on something important, in that for many the "humanities" broadly construed is about fostering some sort of enlightened consciousness (currently going by the name "critical thinking") which also ironically supposes some sort of passive or receptive role for the student to allow their mind to be more or less developed through encountering the canon (however it is construed). the student has to allow themselves to be acted upon, or at the very least has to enter into some sort of arrangement where they agree to be receptive. (this is the ideal case obviously)

in the absence of this framework you have to really rebuild the case for teaching the humanities from the ground up. I don't think it's hard to see why some thing like trigger warnings will trigger a defensive response from those invested in teaching the humanities. trigger warnings effectively reverse the arrangement: the student is given a measure of control over how and what they will encounter.

keep on bringing up those extreme examples that represent nothing relevant

― qualx, Thursday, October 22, 2015 2:28 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

new board description ):

well i think someone mentioned something interesting upthread about the student/teacher relationship now. more of a client relationship. which makes it less about trust on the part of the student and more about tailoring the experience to the student's needs.

x-post

or maybe that was somewhere else and not upthread...

if a student sees their education as more of a service they have bought then they are gonna want that service to meet their needs. in other words.

yeah and there's a really a problem for the humanities in that idea, particularly those that want to be about some idea of the aesthetic as an autonomous (i.e., non-consumerist) realm of experience or communication.

for myself I wonder if trigger warnings are based on an idea that some ways of being upset are ok and some not-ok (and that we can therapeutically define the difference), or if any way of being upset is not-ok. if we assume some *possibility* of being upset by a work of art needs to be part of art, some way for the artwork to "reach" you or have an effect on you, all of a sudden this coercive effect of art becomes inherently threatening if it's not previously consented to. hence even a statue on campus can be a site of protest.

add to the idea that the aesthetic is in some sense a way of acceptably communicating ideas that are not otherwise acceptably communicable and you can see why Plato banished the poets from the republic.

and I think the extreme examples are to the point for now until we can create a clearly delineated procedure for TWs in education. that we can't draw a clear line right now between reasonable and unreasonable accommodation is exactly the problem that needs to be worked out to the satisfaction of both individuals who need protection and the goals of education.

yes and the reason all these issues (supposedly 'conflated') link together in the context of education is that there's a risk of THIS

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/ben-carson-calls-for-a-right-wing-fairness-doctrine-on-college-campuses/411865/

if a too readily abused concept/tool isn't clarified enough to enable it to perform a valid function in the context of education

ha, saying this idea "discredits" ben carson is to presume he has credits to take away

wish there were more work-work being done on this q instead of ppl just ~sharing their opinions, click like if you agree~. I personally think trigger warnings are very nice and considerate, and do no harm to the person being asked to provide them - I don't think it's really a hardship for a course description to conclude This course contains potentially triggering material encompassing themes of (here insert potentially triggering matters), and enrollment constitutes acceptance that the student may be experience distress around these issues -- which, honestly, would probably boost enrollment in some classes -- but I also think, you know, what's the overall suggestion about the nature of the game pre-TW? that, for hundreds of years, students have been living with a genuinely traumatizing level of discomfort, which they're just now becoming able/free to articulate? there's some philosophical in the actual "hard philosophy" sense of the word claims being made about ~~~the Past~~~ vs. the present and what that past was like for the people who lived in it, etc., it seems to me: unless we want to claim that being triggered is somehow new, which, if that's the claim, then there's more in play, etc

I'm not the guy to parse all this shit but some framing of how people managed in the absence of these warnings and what harms they suffered seems...merited, right?

'college students are too sensitive these days' is like the idiot folk-psychological/sociological version of a perception that may actually hold some accuracy: that 'being triggered' and the possibility of regarding oneself as being triggered (rather than having some other attitude toward one's own experiences) actually is a new thing, or at least a significant change in social mentalities over time.

given the uncertainty over how some things like mood disorders, anxiety disoerders, adhd, etc. can be overdiagnosed, whether overdiagnosis can be driven by extrinsic factors rather than accurate assessments of medical facts, whether concrete historical circumstances actually contribute to increased prevalence of some disorders (e.g. maybe modern life MAKES people depressed and anxious etc), etc., doesn't it seem like there are good reasons for not just uncritically acceding to the spread of triggering-related practices and discourse?

and the same way in the other direction: 'i feel like i finally have a way to talk about my experience' doesn't entail that before this there were all kinds of people having the experiences without the tools. it's a historical question what their experience was like, how their times prepared them or impaired them from dealing with it. different times have different tools, as well.

I feel like there's another issue here:
In the past, it seems like we all agreed that the best way to deal with trauma was to talk through it, whether in therapy, or in some kind of support group. If you didn't want to talk about it, you weren't "dealing with your issues." It turns out that maybe that's not always the best way to control PTSD. For those of us old people, I think this thing where people avoid triggers smacks of weakness (even there is growing evidence to suggest that NOT rehashing bad experiences might actually be more effective for some people).

I know I certainly have a knee-jerk bias against trigger warnings, etc., and I think this might be where it's coming from.

that, for hundreds of years, students have been living with a genuinely traumatizing level of discomfort, which they're just now becoming able/free to articulate?

I'm not the guy to parse all this shit but some framing of how people managed in the absence of these warnings and what harms they suffered seems...merited, right?

we don't need to look into the deep past to find out how people managed before trigger warnings or what harm they experienced... there are plenty of people around right now who have had to and continue to have to deal without them, and some of them are arguing for the existence of trigger warnings using their own personal experiences. saying "for hundreds of years" also seems misguided b/c if we're talking specifically about higher education, the people who are most likely to have suffered trauma from racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, etc were mostly excluded from higher education up until fairly recently, and perhaps coincidentally they actually also weren't free to articulate that trauma until fairly recently

the people who are most likely to have suffered trauma from racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia,

why do you mention these things and not the innumerable other forms of trauma that people can and do suffer? (to provide one example: i've had a lot of veterans in my classes over the years?).

also i'm not really sure that being subjected to "transphobia" or any kind of "-phobia" is, in itself, traumatizing on the level where you'd want to set aside an entire policy for helping not to re-trigger it. to imply that they are seems to risk trivializing the concept of PTSD. certainly there are people who have been victims of violence and abuse motivated by racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., who might desire trigger warnings. but there are also people who have been victims of violence, abuse, and acutely traumatic experiences that had little or nothing to do with those things (victims of childhood sexual abuse, war veterans, law enforcement officers, etc.).

sorry, i don't know how that second question mark got into my first of those last two posts.

i mean i don't want to diminish the ambient stress that comes from being a member of an abused/despised/discriminated-against minority--that's very real. but i'm not sure that, outside of a particular incident or incident of violent, abuse, etc., that really adds up to the sort of "trauma" that demands a trigger warning.

apologies if i am completely misreading you.

i mentioned those specifically b/c afaict most of these anti-tw articles seem to be specifically about e.g. victims of rape, racialized violence, homophobic violence, and transphobic violence asking for trigger warnings for these subjects. i said "racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, etc" b/c it seemed more sensitive than saying "lynching, rape, and murder"

and ppl who suffer from ptsd due to racism are actually much more numerous in the u.s. than soldiers suffering from ptsd

"triggers" as a concept are also not confined to ptsd; mental health professionals also talk about triggers in relation to anxiety, addiction, self-harm, eating disorders, etc.

anyway i typed this before your x-posts and it's been said before on this or the other thread but i think it's important so: trigger warnings are not about avoiding talking about a person's issues, they're about allowing a person to control their exposure to material that might harm them. being randomly bombarded with triggering material will make you more sensitive to it and also make you constantly hypervigilant and anxious; being able to engage with triggering material only when you choose, when you know that you can handle it, will let you gradually become desensitized to the trigger

also god many people's experience of ambient "any kind of '-phobia'" is constantly being aware of the threat of actual physical violence against them and yes that can be harmful to a person's mental health

"triggers" as a concept are also not confined to ptsd; mental health professionals also talk about triggers in relation to anxiety, addiction, self-harm, eating disorders, etc.

― 1staethyr, Thursday, October 22, 2015 10:55 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but i guess this is where folks start to have problems with the application of the TW concept. anxiety is pervasive; its arguably a basic condition of contemporary life. surely some experience greater anxiety than others, due to all manner of factors, but where do we draw the line between "normal" levels of anxiety and those that might demand some kind of special handling? i'm not asking that question in a leading fashion -- i'm not saying the line can't or shouldn't be drawn. but i feel like your description of conditions that might demand a TW is troublingly expansive...

xpost

i mean it almost seems as though you are advocating TW for material that might be "triggering" or troubling to:

- any women
- any member of racial or ethnic minorities
- anyone who identifies as LGBT
- etc.

generalized anxiety disorder is in fact a medical diagnosis

One of the few places outside the academy I've regularly seen trigger warnings is in books about self-harm, and suicide. And when you're not well with regards to that stuff there's nothing worse than a TV show unexpectedly depicting it - it's like getting punched in the stomach; sickening, dizzying.

There seems to be an element to this that is about language. The Right seems to have a disgust with certain kinds of 'jargon', which manifests in it's 'anti-PC' stance. When people react to 'triggered', 'BLM', 'man-splaining', 'privilege', 'LBQT' etc. etc. (to pick a bunch of recentish bugbears for the Right, for better or worse) it sometimes seems that it's the fact that these things have been named that is offensive, rather than the idea themselves. The reaction is something like being 'outside' a fashion (because, of course, the Right has plenty of their own magic words)

Lots of psycologists on this thread, which is great because it eliminates the need for any support for the assertions about treatment and diagnosis.

(Less snarky version: using the language of pathology and psychology to score easy political wins is kinda fucked up. There is a difference between asking for proof of a general assertion and denying someone's particular self-identity, and denying that difference is a common tactic in these sorts of debates.)

also common

'you are for this so you are bad'
'you are against this so you are bad'

Lit teachers are also not trained psychologists, so asking them to locate every potential trigger trigger in a text (beyond the obvious) is going to be thorny. Also cases like in the article, where there was disagreement between prof and students about whether a sex scene was consensual, where the instructor may not think something is triggering while a student thinks it is.

Probably the answer is a website that lists the potential triggers for the most widely taught texts that profs can direct students to on syllabus

Perhaps something crowd sourced people with PTSD could make themselves?

when you write a syllabus at most schools you include a little section on disabilities and usually that section informs the student that it is their responsibility to inform the professor of their disability and how reasonable accommodation might be achieved.

I think this is the way forward for trigger warnings because it doesn't leave it up to the professor to figure out ahead of time what *may* be triggering to some generalized and anonymous victim of trauma out there. it allows a particular student to begin a dialogue with a particular professor and, in the best scenario, allows them to work together to find a way through that meets the objectives of the class. there's also common sense, in that a war veteran suffering from ptsd cannot sensibly expect to take a class on war literature if they are liable to be triggered by it.

yes it places onus on the student but from my point of view it's the professor's class and the student is the one who needs to make concessions to enter it (hence my talk about receptivity above).

required classes make this a tougher problem but then I've advocated for getting rid of those.

apropos to chachi/1staethyr

http://www.wired.com/2015/10/how-black-lives-matter-uses-social-media-to-fight-the-power/

(Less snarky version: using the language of pathology and psychology to score easy political wins is kinda fucked up. There is a difference between asking for proof of a general assertion and denying someone's particular self-identity, and denying that difference is a common tactic in these sorts of debates.)

i can't quite figure out who this is aimed it, or which arguments it's opposed to.

I think this is the way forward for trigger warnings because it doesn't leave it up to the professor to figure out ahead of time what *may* be triggering to some generalized and anonymous victim of trauma out there. it allows a particular student to begin a dialogue with a particular professor

students may not be super-excited about having to tell all their professors about their past personal traumas but idk