A group of museums in the United Kingdom published a “Trigger Toolkit” that helps museums and other archival organizations approach “preventing, responding to and managing a triggering event within a training session.” In its glossary, the guidebook describes “trigger” as a term “first developed in the clinical context of PTSD” that now more broadly refers to a “stimulus which causes a painful, uncomfortable or traumatic memory to resurface.” The guide provides an expansive list of “common triggers” that includes “civil disasters,” “classism,” “climate emergency,” “debt,” “divorce,” “gambling,” “genomics,” “hateful language,” “immigration,” “policing,” “politics,” “transatlantic slave trade/colonialism,” “transphobia,” and “violence.”A “trigger warning,” according to the guide, can be appropriately conveyed in a variety of different formats, such as verbally disclosing forthcoming “sensitive information,” or mentioning such content in the subject line of an email (you know, for all those times you email out a PDF of Mein Kampf). When giving a presentation, you should have a warning before you switch to the slide with the “sensitive or triggering content,” and a document should have a warning in a bright contrastive color on the page immediately preceding the supposedly offensive material. 

Here’s the tricky part: Warning people about potentially hurtful content related to a particular source of trauma necessarily references a particular source of trauma. And thus the guide has a trigger warning before its list of trigger warnings. The guide states “the following two pages contain potentially triggering content” in all-caps and bright red letters before the section that “provides a broad overview of sensitive topics,” such as “abortion.” Additionally, red exclamation points are on the “triggering” pages to caution you that you might be upset. Rather than serving as a mechanism to ensure good “mental health” and “psychological wellbeing,” it seems that trigger warnings actually put you on high alert and exacerbate anxiety.

Funnily enough, the guidebook neglects to consider one potential circumstance. What are the appropriate steps to console me, a person who is triggered by trigger warnings because they are so annoying? Perhaps the expansive list of potential triggers isn’t long enough.