At the end of last semester, many universities across the nation faced complaints from students urging them to include warnings for class content that may trigger uncomfortable and harmful thoughts and feelings from students.
Trigger warnings, a term that has been around since the dawn of the World Wide Web, aim to warn individuals that the material they are about to see may cause distress. Campus advocates would like to see a warning included in syllabi for class material which may affect students dealing with post- traumatic stress.
It is difficult for me to imagine why anyone would have an issue with this. It’s no secret that violence, rape and other tragedies take place each day. And LSU’s campus is full of students who have survived these incidents.
We aren’t talking about a student being afraid of water and wanting to leave geography class. We’re talking about a sexual assault survivor being warned that, on a particular day in their fiction class, they will be subjected to material and discussion that could cause flashbacks and distress centering around their attack.
This sort of distress could be detrimental to the student’s mental health.
Those who have survived tragedy deserve respect and compassion as they continue to rebuild their lives. They should be applauded for having the strength to get out of bed, not teased or put down for being sensitive to certain topics.
Human beings are emotional creatures. We respond irrationally to different subject matter, especially those we associate with traumatic experiences. And we should not be forced to sit through a lecture on subject matter that is troubling to our mental health.
Our nation is quick to use mental health as a scapegoat whenever a bomb is planted or a gun is brought into a school. But we rarely discuss the ways mental health is represented each day in public settings. By being dismissive, we’ve made it possible for an argument against trigger warnings to be accepted.
In May, columnist Jenny Jarvie wrote in New Republic that trigger warnings are misrepresented as a gesture of empathy. She went on to say that they lead to an “over-preoccupation with one’s own feelings.” But I’ll disagree wholeheartedly with her connotation.
Survivors of traumatic experiences have every right to be preoccupied with their feelings. Violent and sexual attacks are about taking away power. The most important thing for survivors of those attacks is feeling a sense of control. Self-care and paying attention to your feelings is important for mental health in the same way that you drink water when you’re thirsty and eat food when you’re hungry.
Our society is full of physical trigger warnings already. We are warned not to go faster than 45 mph on a dangerous turn. We are warned that the contents of our disposable coffee cup may be hot. We are warned that certain foods contain ingredients to which we could be allergic.
The only difference between those warnings and the trigger warnings students wish to see in their classes is that one is physical health and the other is mental health. And we have got to stop dismissing mental health’s importance.
I cannot imagine a university such as LSU, which is currently working to improve student health by imposing a campus wide tobacco ban, would be unwilling to work toward improving student mental health.
The LSU community is not a dog-eat-dog, make-it-if-you-can competition. We thrive whenever all members of our community feel safe and respected. And adding trigger warnings to class descriptions and syllabi would be a step toward an even more successful community.
Jana King is a nineteen-year-old communication studies junior from Ponchatoula, La.