CW: As this article is about content warnings, there is discussion of trauma, being triggered and symptoms of being triggered, and brief mention of some common triggers
If you’ve seen “CW”, “TW” or “CN”, followed by a list of themes, such as at the beginning of this article, then you’ve encountered content warnings before. Whether you use them or not, they’re vital pieces of information that allow people that have experienced trauma to avoid being triggered. “Being triggered” is an abnormal psychological state that forces an individual to relive their trauma in a way that feels as real as it did the first time.
In recent years, content warnings (also known as trigger warnings or content notices) have had a lot of negative attention. It’s mostly come in the form of reactionary articles written in the wake of college professors using content warnings to signal potentially triggering material in their lectures1, and a handful of psychological studies that claimed the warnings have little to no positive effect on mental wellbeing2. My own university experience was coloured by this backlash too - an English Literature lecture attended by some of my friends included content warnings, and later articles surfaced in several mainstream media outlets claiming that students had become too sensitive3. Looking more widely, it’s easy to see the debate’s linguistic roots, as some internet communities have gradually shifted the meaning of the word “triggered” away from its original use in the world of clinical psychology. Trends across social media platforms have shown certain groups of users applying the term to describe behaviour deemed in some way over-emotional4, leaving people with trauma even less vocabulary to communicate what is already a highly misunderstood experience. I’ll go into the specific differences between being triggered and being a bit peeved later on.
I’ve summarised my feelings on the topic into five arguments in favour of using content warnings - or an equivalent - in art, media, education and beyond. I hope, primarily, that these points convey the necessity of content warnings in improving accessibility. Beyond that though, in writing content warnings and writing about them, I have so often discovered a profound empathetic value in considering and adjusting myself for the benefit of another’s mental wellbeing, and I hope to share that too.
More people can access more art
Content warnings are most often thought of as being useful for people that have experienced trauma in their lives. In many ways this is true, but this belief is shifting in the same way that research and theoretical studies are shifting our conception of trauma. Whilst, for many people, “trauma” connotes devastating life events that happen to only a handful of people, many psychologists and therapists believe that trauma consists of any event in our lives that we were not emotionally equipped to deal with at the time5. This new understanding significantly alters the demographic for content warnings. Whilst they remain essential for sufferers of PTSD and similar conditions, a much wider range of people might feel their benefits - namely, anyone who wishes to avoid, or prepare to be faced with, a certain topic, even if it’s just that once.
Content warnings skeptics often fear that when someone encounters warnings that include some of their triggers, they will then opt out of viewing or participating in that content. This reasoning bolsters anti-content-warnings arguments, fearing that PTSD sufferers will choose to avoid their trigger rather than develop coping mechanisms for it6. In my personal experience, access to content warnings has allowed me to see and participate in more art than I would have had those warnings not been available - if I see one of my triggers, I can put in motion the coping strategies I have in my repertoire. It’s also important to stress that how someone deals with their trauma is an intensely complicated and personal experience, and by and large only specialists have any grounds to try and control that. It feeds into the paternalistic outlook some people adopt when discussing the imagined figure of disabled people, and/or mentally unwell people.
Not only does the range of people able to access art increase with the use of content warnings, so too does the range of art. Some people may fear that artists and educators may avoid exploring triggering content altogether, perhaps due to anxiety that they might get content warnings wrong, thus making content warnings a tool for censorship. In reality, writing content warnings can be both simple and effective, and there are many online guides7. Therefore, I’m a firm believer that providing content warnings for art does not restrict the art that can be made available: any trigger can be effectively warned for.
John Whipple sums up this argument well. He’s the founder of doesthedogdie.com, a crowdsourced platform that provides warnings for hundreds of trigger categories in over 4,000 films, 700 TV shows, 400 video games, and 300 books. He believes that “[doesthedogdie.com is] not a censor. We’re all about letting people have fun at the movies, and our users end up watching more movies, not fewer. We help people see movies they wouldn’t otherwise see.”8.
2. It doesn’t take anything away from art
Another knee-jerk reaction I see is the belief that making the themes of the content known prior to its consumption lessens the value of the art, or one’s experience of it. The US media’s response to college students advocating for the inclusion of content warnings in their lectures demonstrates this belief. The American Association of University Professors, believing that providing warnings would not only devalue their material but devalue education as a whole, released the following statement: "The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual"9. It’s interesting to me that this view conflates the act of challenging someone in an educational setting with emotionally and psychologically wounding them. In my eyes, it’s true that art should challenge its audience, as education should challenge its students, as media should challenge its consumers. It teaches us to be critical and it shows us perspectives beyond our own. It’s also true that no one can be challenged whilst they’re in a state of self-preservation - which is the state that triggering content forces its audience to inhabit. In order to be led into the realms of discomfort, one must start from a position of safety and comfort, allowing open-mindedness, not self-defence. Historically, professors might have chosen to ignore their students’ reactions a little more, yet the commodification of education has cast students in the role of consumers, with the attached benefit of having more control over the commodity they pay for. It shocks me that professors, and other people in positions of power in the art industry or elsewhere, are only now being held to account for the consequences of their actions when their livelihood is reliant on student and consumer feedback.
More than the fact that content warnings don’t take anything away from art, they might add something to it. Some educators have begun to think about the intrinsic benefits content warnings have on how we understand art, aside from the extrinsic benefits to those with trauma. Ian Burrows describes the result of highlighting triggering content in terms of how analytical discussions proceed in English Literature lectures. He explains that by centering exploration of the experience of real individuals with a specific trauma - as opposed to the perpetrator of the trauma, as texts can often do - the function of the traumatic event as a literary device becomes clear. Commonly, in texts like Shakespeare’s Titus Andronius and Sarah Kane’s Blasted, a traumatic event takes place in order to further the narrative of the non-victim protagonist, or to illustrate the violence of the world. In the words of Burrows, this form of literary representation treats traumatic events in “ridiculous, comic, or frivolous ways”10, and fail to consider the emotional and psychological fallout experienced by victims. Alternatively, by recalibrating the focus in education and art towards the lives and experiences of those with trauma, the accepted narrative begins to morph away from accepted violence and towards tangible consequences. How this might translate to how we conceptualise real life violence and trauma is yet to be seen, but the outlook is a positive one.
3. You can choose whether to read them or not
Good content warnings should be optional to read. This is for two groups of people, the first being those that would want to avoid reading what can feel like spoilers, and the second being those that can be triggered by the words used to signal some themes. When I write content warnings for theatre or work with companies to help them write their own, I offer alternatives to announcing or displaying content warnings - solutions like providing a content warning leaflet, where any themes are listed overleaf, leaving the choice to turn the page to the reader. If your content warnings are online, try a link to something like an online document containing content warnings, allowing the individual to choose to click through or not.
To me, informed choice is one of the most crucial pillars of meaningful accessibility. It’s completely fine if the way you like to view and participate in art includes being shocked, being surprised, being caught off guard, and therefore you feel content warnings aren’t compatible with you. But you must accept that that is your choice and is just as well-founded as another’s choice to read content warnings. Equally, it’s possible that you like being shocked and surprised and caught off guard and you also choose to read content warnings - the two aren’t incompatible. But extending a decision to not read them onto others denies them that crucial pillar of accessible art. Worse, it assumes you know what they need better than they do.
4. They help to bring awareness to mental wellbeing
The type of questions that content warnings raise are ones like “could this be harmful to me today?”, “could this be harmful to me in the future?”, “could this be harmful to someone else?” - all of which pull one’s attention to mental wellbeing. As awareness of mental wellbeing and some mental health conditions is on the rise, content warnings are an important piece of the puzzle. They communicate how certain themes can harm us beyond what is part of everyday life. They don’t aim to help us avoid upset, or shock, or anger - each of these feelings are part of everyday life. They enable us to avoid being triggered - a damaging state of being that is characterised by symptoms like nausea, panic, dissociation, and a feeling that you are experiencing your trauma all over again11. When I’m triggered, I feel a rush of panic, and then derealisation - a feeling of heaviness and fogginess, and that nothing around me is real. Being in that state is not a part of everyday life, like feeling uncomfortable or upset. It can take me days to recover, and can lead to increased flashbacks and nightmares.
The reason why I get triggered is that I have PTSD, but I have to stress that using content warnings isn’t a diagnosis-only club. As I’ve said, having triggers isn’t an experience that belongs to any one group, and trauma doesn’t have to stem from a “big” event in your life. If you read content warnings and ask yourself the types of questions laid out above, whether or not you then go on to engage coping strategies or avoid the following content, then content warnings have fulfilled an important responsibility. They have enabled you to keep a closer eye on mental wellbeing, both your own and others’. Acknowledging what being triggered truly is, as well as how this experience fits into our growing knowledge of mental wellbeing, is a far-reaching and far-sighted argument for content warnings.
5. “You can’t put content warnings on real life”...unless you can
And finally, one of my favourite last-line-of-defence comebacks from content warning cynics. Firstly, there are a few versions of content warnings that have been part of our arts and media for a long time. Film ratings like U, PG, 12, 18 are a great example, having been introduced in the UK by the British Board of Film Classification in 1912. They point to the presence of themes like animal cruelty, warfare, and sexual conduct12, and have recently been adopted by streaming service giant Netflix13. Next, you might recognise announcements like “the following programme may contain themes that some viewers may find offensive” or “the following programme contains strong language and sexual references” being read at the beginning of a TV programme. These warnings are used across channels in both the UK and the US, and give viewers a chance to make a choice in how they proceed. Lastly, to pluck an example from the centre of the British artistic canon, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream features a lovely dialogue between the players about warning their audience not to be scared of the lion character in their play, during which Snout suggests that “another prologue must tell he is not a lion”14. These are just three examples from the long history of content warnings within arts and media, stretching back more than four hundred years - they are not new phenomena, and you’re likely to have come across them far more often than you’ve realised.
Secondly, to take content warnings outside of the domain of arts and media, one needs only to reduce content warnings to what they are at their core: compassion for another’s trauma and your own, and adjusting your behaviour so others can adjust theirs. In “real life” this might just be a sentence mid-conversation - “before I do, is it okay if I talk about X?” - or a sentence at the top of a social media post - “this post is about Y”. I sincerely believe that we live in a world where people are prepared to engage with content warnings in a wider sense, driven by a growing understanding of mental wellbeing and vocabulary for broaching such topics. More than that - I think we live in a world where many have been doing this for a long while.
Here, I hope I’ve shown the crucial role that content warnings play in accessibility within the arts. In the most immediate sense, they allow an individual to make an informed choice about how they wish to proceed with the content in question. In considering our own choice, we also consider other perspectives, potentially leading us to a more accepting and tolerant way of participating in and consuming art. More broadly, content warnings invite us to challenge and build upon accepted knowledge regarding mental wellbeing. There is deep empathy and profound human connection available in recognising and accounting for emotional pain, be it our own or someone else’s. That pain is a part of life - reliving it is not.
If you’re still struggling to get on board, or know someone who is, think of content warnings as allergy information for art - they’re easy to include pieces of information that are vital for avoiding adverse reactions. They mean that more people can consume a product, they don’t make consuming it any worse, you don’t have to read them if you don’t want to, they make us more aware of common medical conditions, and they’ve been around for ages.
14 A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Act III, Scene I, Line 32