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Comment by addicted | Hacker News Reader

As the spouse of someone who suffers from depression and suicidal thinking the outrage against “trigger warnings” really pisses me off.

Trigger warnings are just that. Warnings.

We watched A Star is Born, and having my spouse go back on almost a years worth of progress and treatment when a single “trigger warning” could have avoided that is beyond enraging.

And what’s most hypocritical is the people who are complaining about trigger warnings are people who are complaining that a little paragraph of text describing certain known triggers may be contained in the text or movie before. So people who suffer from a variety of potentially harmful diseases such as depression and PTSD are pussies because they need a trigger warning to help them avoid media that may be harmful to them, but you’re a strong reasonable and logical person to protest the inclusion of a minor warning that you are under no obligation to read and can easily skip.

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The underlying fact is that everything is subjective and trying to enumerate every possible situation that someone may react to is impossible. Why is it not the responsibility of the individual to learn more about the movie by checking the ratings and synopsis?

Can you explain what exactly a trigger warning would even contain that somehow helps here? It seems that if a single movie can unwind a "years worth of progress" then the situation is rather critical and movies are the least of your concerns. How do you label everyday life with such warnings?

I have zero issues with trigger warnings. If it helps someone so be it. No skin off my back.

Just alot of this country views them with disdain which is unfortunate. It's been branded as weak to have a mental disorder. Meanwhile beliveing in Q-Anon is perfectly ok to them.

I completely understand and agree with your frustration. The blame is not only the people who deride the value of trigger warnings, but also on the Left, which has this horrible tendency to take good ideas and apply them to every situation imaginable watering them down to the point of uselessness. I say this as someone very much on the Left. The evolution of trigger warnings into content warnings took them from a real way of protecting people into a self-parodying attempt at shielding people from topics they don't like.

Doesn't really seem like the movie's place to create its own trigger warnings. There could be hundreds of warnings per movie. I've even seen tumblr fan fiction warnings that a story only contains CIS relationships. Not to mention, how do you identify and quantify triggers in a medium? It's not like it's some solved science and the patriarchy is just avoiding it. These are open ended questions without one size fits all solutions.

For example, if your wife has over a year of progress on the line, and there isn't a culture of mainstream trigger warnings, why did you play it so loose by wandering blindly into a movie?

And then you lash out at the world for when your gamble doesn't pay off?

I think this is what people roll their eyes at when they think of trigger warnings: the abolition of personal responsibility and effort, that you have any number of personal issues yet expect the world to read your mind instead of, say, watching a movie before your mentally diseased (your words) wife watches it to ensure her safety.

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