The most popular Urban Dictionary entry for “trigger warning” reads:

A phrase posted at the beginning of various posts, articles, or blogs. Its purpose is to warn weak minded people who are easily offended that they might find what is being posted offensive in some way due to its content, causing them to overreact or otherwise start acting like a dipshit. Popular on Reddit SRS or other places that social justice warriors like to hang out.

As of now, trigger warnings have become wrapped up in a separate debate about the place that colleges have in determining the social climate on campus -- one side of this debate has come to call it an argument over what they call “political correctness.” Trigger warnings seem to have inherited their controversy from this debate.

A viable cause for the blurriness between the two topics is that colleges decided to pick up trigger warnings as an academic policy at about the same time that this debate kicked into gear. Perhaps it was that one particular side of the debate happened to push for trigger warnings as a byproduct of separate ideas; it’s also possible that colleges themselves got the two mixed up. In any case, sovereign issues have caused trigger warnings have become much more embattled than they were otherwise even likely to become.

Then, what are trigger warnings actually meant to be?

The core beneficiaries of trigger warnings are those who suffer from mental illness, most often PTSD. For example, victims of rape often experience intense and uncontrollable flashbacks when presented with material that depicts sexual assault. For those who suffer from PTSD or panic attacks, navigating the world without accidentally prompting a mental breakdown is a debilitating challenge. That being said, no one expects or desires to censor all the world’s content, even to accommodate for mental illness, so, as society has become more comfortable discussing mental health, those with mental illnesses have looked for a solution that doesn’t create new problems.

Trigger warnings are this solution. They work in the same way that movie ratings do; they are a brief statement at the beginning of the reading or selection or article, declaring the presence of graphic content and the nature of that content -- for example, This article contains brief mentions of rape and suicide. It allows for patients still undergoing treatment to regulate their intake of content related to their trauma, and aid their recovery, and without restricting anyone’s freedom of speech.

So, why do some of us hate trigger warnings?

I tend to think it’s because they’ve become conflated with the Microaggression Framework.

Microaggressions, if you’re not familiar, are comments and actions that imply derogatory beliefs about someone’s identity. An example from Psychology Today is “Two gay men hold hands in public and are told not to flaunt their sexuality. (Hidden message: Same-sex displays of affection are abnormal and offensive. Keep it private and to yourselves.)” People from underprivileged backgrounds have to deal with this kind of rhetoric frequently -- so while a single instance of a microaggression might seem rather harmless to someone who hasn’t experienced one, the actual experience of microaggressions is a gradual repetitive exposure to a multitude of these sorts of comments, which, over time, can erode at emotional well-being.

The nature and impact of microaggressions is not disputed among those who know what they’re talking about; the more substantial debate concerns what ought to be done to combat microaggressions -- and colleges have become the center of this debate. Simultaneously, those who happen advocate for administrative action on microaggressions have advocated for trigger warnings because they often benefit similar communities.

Unfortunately, this has led a mass confusion of the two concepts. Greg Lukainoff and Jonathan Haidt, in what has become an extremely popular article from The Atlantic, effectively describe them as sides of the same coin.

Now, where do I stand on microaggressions?

In fact, I’m not going to say where I stand, because I think it’s important to recognize that trigger warnings are a wholly different policy from those that might be forward to mitigate microaggressions. It’s not impossible for trigger warnings to go awry -- if a trigger warning were ever to allow a student to avoid content that is politically difficult and not psychologically damaging, then something would certainly have gone terribly wrong. But implemented properly, trigger warnings serve to aid those recovering from traumatic incidents, not limiting our exposure to troubling issues, but actually preparing us to face them.

The point is that regardless of where we stand on the subject of marginalization and campus climate, the mentally ill really ought not to fall into our crosshairs.