BAKER BAKER

I bet they knew!!! Think MKULTRA

"Harvard Study: Trigger Warnings Might Coddle the Mind"

"Trigger warnings may do more harm than good."

"A new study out of Harvard—the first randomized controlled experiment designed to examine the effects of trigger warnings on individual resilience—may indicate that Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt were right about trigger warnings.1

In the fall of 2015, Greg Lukianoff, First Amendment Lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (for which I work), and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business, published an article in The Atlantic.2 In it, they detailed how college campuses may inadvertently promote mental habits identical to the “cognitive distortions” that cognitive behavioral therapists teach their clients to recognize and overcome. The pair argued that some campus practices—presumably intended to protect students from being harmed by words and ideas deemed offensive or distressing—seemed to be interfering with students' ability to get along with each other, and could even be having a deleterious effect on their mental health. Among those practices: training students to identify microaggressions (things people say or do, often unintentionally, that are interpreted as expressions of bigotry), turning classrooms and lecture halls into intellectual safe spaces (where students are protected from words and ideas they might find upsetting), and the issuing of trigger warnings: alerts about the potentially “triggering” content of written work, films, lectures, and other presentations.

A “trigger” is something that affects those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It viscerally reminds them of a past traumatic experience, and provokes an extreme and maladaptive negative emotional response. The trigger itself is not harmful, but is something in a person’s environment that reminds that person of past trauma. The thinking behind issuing trigger warnings is that for people who have experienced trauma, distress will be reduced by warning them about possible ways in which they could be “triggered” by content that could remind them of their traumatic experience. The warning ostensibly allows them to mentally prepare for the challenge of confronting potentially triggering material, or to avoid the prospective trigger altogether.

Harvard psychology professor and PTSD expert, Dr. Richard McNally (an author of the recent study) explained in 2016 essay in the New York Times that “severe emotional reactions triggered by course material are a signal that students need to prioritize their mental health and obtain evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral therapies that will help them overcome PTSD.”3 In other words, severe emotional reactions are not an indication that professors or others should warn students in advance that material could be triggering for those with PTSD, nor that potentially triggering material should be removed from the syllabi. Constantly warning people with PTSD about possible triggers could potentially even interfere with their recovery. As Lukianoff and Haidt point out in their newest book, The Coddling of the American Mind,4 the avoidance of triggers is not a treatment for PTSD; it is a classic symptom of it. In fact, according to Dr. McNally, therapies that promote recovery from PTSD “involve gradual, systematic exposure to traumatic memories until [the capacity of those memories] to trigger distress diminishes.”

"The use of trigger warnings originated on the internet, and they are applied much more broadly than to actual PTSD triggers—which are typically more about an individual's personal experience of trauma than representations of similar kinds of trauma. A trigger can be something as simple as a smell, a sound, a certain color shirt, or the place or type of place where the trauma occurred. A trigger can even be a language, an accent, or the lilt of someone's voice. On campus, however, anything that trauma survivors find upsetting—regardless of whether they suffer from PTSD, and regardless of whether it's an actual trigger—can be a candidate for a trigger warning; as can any material about the mistreatment of people from marginalized groups, and anything else that students or professors predict could be upsetting can be given a “trigger warning,” even without trauma survivors."

MORE AT LINK!!

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-and-the-pursuit-leadership/201808/harvard-study-trigger-warnings-might-coddle-the

>>2580739

For example, in 2014, Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen published an essay in The New Yorker outlining the effects of trigger warnings of pedagogy, and how the concept of "triggers" had come to mean content that was generally upsetting, not just material that could trigger an emotional reaction from those with PTSD. She reported that campus organizations were requesting trigger warnings for classes covering rape law, and were advising students who believed they might be triggered not to “feel pressured” to be present at class sessions in which rape law would be covered. “Some students,” Gersen lamented, “have even suggested that rape law should not be taught because of its potential to cause distress,” and further, some professors had stopped teaching rape law altogether because they feared that covering the potentially triggering material could make the classroom “a potentially traumatic environment” and emotionally “injure” their students.6 In their 2015 article, Lukianoff and Haidt used examples of requests for trigger warnings for things like misogyny, classism, and even privilege, and argued that “rather than trying to protect students from words and ideas that they will inevitably encounter, colleges should do all they can to equip students to thrive in a world full of words and ideas that they cannot control.”

>>2580739

^^^^^^^^^^^

BAKER

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