A meta-analysis of the effects of trigger warnings and content notes

well i'm not OP but here are some of my views:

- one important dimension of the "should" in this question is how much choice the viewer of the media has in viewing the media. this is part of why schools are such a big part of the conversation about content warnings, because the students can't just choose to opt out of readings without consequences

- another important dimension is the delivery platform and audience size. sometimes you can just ask the person who made or is showing you the thing about some very specific content you'd like to avoid or be prepared for, so specifying everything isn't as important there. otoh, if you're a giant media property with millions of viewers, maybe the cost/benefit of listing exactly when/where particular things happen looks a little better

- depending on platform, lots of detail could be more or less practical. e.g. if you're making a web page it's easy to say "content warnings: click for details > detailsdetailsdetails click for more details > detaileddetailsdetaileddetails", which easily allows the viewer to choose how much detail they want rather than picking for them, but that can be harder to pull off in other formats

- if you find this topic interesting, consider looking for literature on topics like accessibility and disability justice (not sure i could recommend a particular one since i've formed my views on this sort of thing piecemeal and through community). there is a lot of interesting moral thought on the subject of "ok so this thing is helpful to some people sometimes, sooo how much should we actually do it?"

There was a TW on the opening screen about suicide. I'd have liked to see it. Obviously that was my friend's error and not the game's, and we discussed this afterwards. What I wanted to highlight is that a trigger warning was erased, and this was a very vulnerable time for me when it would have been very useful.

I'm not entirely sure I've understood your objection properly, but I'll try to address your questions.

Yeah it's expected that I'll be put in unusual situations, no I don't expect authors to anticipate each trauma I could possibly have, but surely the very obvious ones can be covered.

Should art immitate life or be safe? Neither and both, there's plenty of room in this world for the most gritty horror movie and for Blue's Clues.

How could I have known it was the outcome? The trigger warning was as specific as it needed to be - "TW: Suicide" is plenty.

ETA: The general vibe I'm getting here is you're asking, "where do you draw the line?", as if this were a slippery slope. The answer is, it's a matter of taste and judgement. It's not any less tractable then the question, when do you decide a work of art is done?

Naturally this opens up the observation that, if it's about judgment, one could decide to include no trigger warnings, like my friend did when presenting the game to me. And sure, I'm not saying that's invalid. More that its bad taste, and I've elaborated as to why I feel that way.

this analogy breaks down on a number of levels.

1. patients invented and self-prescribed the pill originally

2. the doctor has concluded that the pills are harmful by studying what happens who do not have the illness the pills are meant to treat take the pills

3. the doctor didn't really keep track of what doses were given to different patients

i.e.

1. trigger warnings were not originally forced on people, they were created by people who found them helpful to help themselves

2. the studies in the meta analysis are all on general populations, in particular mechanical turk and college students

3. there is no discussion of the different effect different implementations of content warnings can have. for example, the only study that measured physiological responses instead of using self-reported anxiety showed the highest anxiety response. probably, because it also gave a completely general and non-specific content warning that went like this: "The next page has the link to the movie clip. Researchers have been asked to give a trigger warning for the clip". so they showed that when told some arbitrary but highly disturbing thing could happen at any point during a video, people in general will be more anxious when watching the video. and concluded that content warnings are a harmful practice.

I definitely use content warnings to avoid stuff. If I see suicide, "that's a nope from me dawg".

I feel like I'm not asking for much here. :(

I grew up in a religious fundamentalist household that tried to shelter me from every "bad" thing in the world. I wasn't allowed to watch many cartoons because they were "too violent. It's probably for that reason that few things fill me with more disgust and rage than trigger warnings and censorship. Thank God for the Internet coming along to enable me to see every form of violence, abuse, pornography, torture, death, suicide advocacy, and bomb making material in the world. I am eternally grateful to be the worldly person I am to day and horrified to see trigger warnings appearing in most of the executive communications at my workplace. I used to have crippling anxiety, PTSD, thought of suicide every day, and struggled with a large assortment of chronic mental health conditions that disable many people, so in theory I'm someone that should want this. Deliberately exposing myself to as much of the worst of the world as possible made me much happier and stronger.