“Trigger Warnings are for snowflakes.”

4 min readAug 25, 2021

“Trigger Warnings, what a load of old shit eh. Content warnings for weak little snowflakes who can’t cope with real life”

A Trigger warning, or content warning, is a statement at the start of a piece of writing, TV, a lecture etc that warns the audience of potentially upsetting content. When I first heard about trigger warnings a few years ago I didn’t really have an opinion other than one of mild disinterest. I understood the concept but had no strong feelings either way. There were a lot of stories around at the time about the chilling effect that political correctness was having on American campuses and this was kind of lumped in as being part of that problem. Coddling students, not preparing them for the harshness of the ‘real world’, that sort of thing. The idea that people had suffered trauma to the extent they needed warning labels on the media they consumed was seen as problematic then, and now the issue of adding content warnings to things is just part of the mainstream culture war bullshit.

Doing a quick search for “Trigger Warning” on a few newspaper sites today:

The Telegraph — 4990 stories.

The Times — 2640 stories.

The Daily Mail — 33600 stories. Thirty three thousand. What??

As is usually the case, you become more familiar with something if it affects you personally. In 2015 a terrible thing happened to a friend of mine, (you can read about it here) and for about three or four years after, seeing a person hanging in films or TV ‘triggered’ me. When I say triggered, I mean I had a sudden, uncontrollable emotional reaction.

I remember one of the first times it happened. I’d just sat down on the sofa to eat my dinner and put Jessica Jones on Netflix, where in one scene the baddie, Kilgrave, played by David Tennant, used his mind control to make four people stand on a bar with nooses around their necks. I immediately started sobbing so hard I had to put my dinner down and leave the room. It was instant and visceral and took me totally by surprise. That happened quite a few times over the coming months and years. Once I had become hyper aware of hanging being an issue for me, I saw it all over the damn place. You’d be surprised about how many programs have used it as a plot device.

Here are just a few that caught me out.

Jessica Jones

The Handmaid’s tale

Jojo Rabbit

The Walking Dead

Line of Duty

Game of Thrones

Westworld

Legion

American Gods

A quick search for the keyword ‘Hanging’ in IMDB brings back 1407 results, and not one program I watched which caused me to have that reaction had a specific content warning for it.

Do I think the programs I watched should have had a content warning? That’s something I thought about a lot over the years. The specificity of my trigger was a problem though, a generic warning of violence or suicide wouldn’t have warned me about the specifics. Someone being shot, stabbed, or slitting their wrists wouldn’t have had the same emotional effect on me, so a generic warning becomes pointless anyway unless I wanted to avoid the show just in case.

The things I have read recently seem to question the helpfulness of warnings in the first place, (Links below) potentially promoting avoidance behaviour which is not something someone suffering from trauma should do as it slows down healing and in some cases may make things worse.

I couldn’t help but wonder, if there was a specific content warning would it have changed my behaviour? Would I have avoided watching it?

I’ve come out the other side of that trauma now, if hanging appears on the TV I still look away because it makes me uncomfortable, but I don’t get upset like I used to. In the beginning, my partner would warn me not to look or ask if we should turn it off but I would make a point of sitting through it as I didn’t want to be affected like that forever, and I worry a content warning would have made me too anxious to even get that far? Who knows, presently I’m glad there wasn’t one so I could keep challenging myself to deal with the emotional response as it occured.

I’m no professional and only have my own experience to guide me, but I know the way some people take the piss out of ‘snowflakes’ that may want warnings have no thought at all to either their usefulness or their harm, they just seem cruel and lacking in compassion.

“Trigger Warnings are for snowflakes.”

Written by Guy O’Harrison