Bestselling author and former Chair of the Society of Authors Joanne Harris has recently announced she will personally be adding trigger warnings to all her novels. This isn’t particularly surprising given the author’s hyper-progressive ideological leanings. Although to many it might seem confusing why her cosy, confectionary-themed novel Chocolat needs such warnings (other than maybe for those on a diet), tags such as “mild violence, death of a parent and outdated terms for the travelling community” will be added. Whatever. I’m not personally a big reader of Harris’s work. If she wishes to infantilise her own readers this way, she can fill her boots.

What is — to borrow a word I seldom use un-ironically — problematic is Harris’s analogy as to why she has made this decision:

To me, trigger warnings are like wheelchair ramps. They exist because some people need them. The people who don’t can either use them anyway, or take the stairs. Their choice. The fact that some people don’t take the stairs does not detract in any way from my experience, nor do I hang around the wheelchair ramp mocking those who use it, or tell them how much better it would be for them to be exposed to the climb.

There is a lot wrong here on various levels. Firstly, the comparison itself is a poor one from a literary standpoint. The function of wheelchair ramps is to enable the disadvantaged to access something — a building — far more easily. The purpose of trigger warnings, in contrast, is to symbolically communicate “You might want to stay out of here”. A clear indication not a lot of critical thought went into this analogy.

The second point to take umbrage with is the idea that trigger warnings “do not detract in any way” from one’s individual experience with text or media. Some people enjoy going into a book or film or TV series completely blind, wanting to be shocked or even a little bit disturbed by the unexpected — for the most part, I’m one of them. In an artistic culture where mass saturation of entertainment means the steak rather than the sizzle is sold in film trailers and book blurbs, many relish the thrill of surprise. It can be highly irritating when, for instance, the pre-screening BBFC rating highlights a death or incident that turns out to be central to a film’s climax. It can also undermine the emotional impact a director or writer has worked hard to achieve. (However much I may struggle to respect his personal legacy, I’ve always admired Hitchcock’s pedantry when it came to policing spoilers in Psycho, to the point he banned cinema-goers from being permitted into screenings if they were late and bought all copies of the novel in bookshops so people couldn’t read it in advance). 

How Harris wishes to patronise her readers is her business, but hopefully no other authors follow suit

Some in the pro-trigger warning camp may argue that any spoiler inconvenience for the audience is worth it if it spares particularly sensitive individuals discomfort. I, however, am of the potentially unpopular opinion that the experience of the majority takes precedent.

Who am I to disregard the plight of the would-be triggered though? Thus brings me to the third and, by far, biggest issue I have with Harris’s ignorant wheelchair ramp analogy, and I’m afraid it’s a deeply personal one. I live with diagnosed PTSD. Actually, I live with C-PTSD (complex) which, in short, is even more difficult to treat. Moreover, I am an occasional user of trigger warnings myself, although I prefer the more sensible, pre-Tumblr label “content advisory”. I can break bread with the trigger-happy brigade in agreeing these warnings can and do serve a very helpful function at times. Where we differ strongly is that I believe the onus is on me and me alone, not anyone else, especially the creator, to evaluate what may or may not be good for my health. 

Aside: there are ignoramuses on the opposite side who assert anyone who can’t face certain content in films or books due to trauma or gets deeply upset by it, is an exemplar snowflake. Whilst exposure to difficult things if you have PTSD is important for rebuilding confidence — there is evidence that trigger warnings can actually enhance anxiety and worsen health — I can attest that the cure for jumping at shadows is not to stare into darkness at every opportunity. For years this was my tactic. I pretended to others and myself I was fine, that I could magic myself tough enough to ward off the sensory flashbacks, depression and nightmares watching scenes reminiscent of the violence I experienced and witnessed in childhood brought on me. 

In the end, it was my husband who gently put his foot down after we went to see The Godfather on its 50th anniversary cinematic release and, having completely forgotten how much domestic violence there was in it, I spent the afternoon insisting I WAS FINE only to end up crying uncontrollably all evening, the same as when we watched I, Tonya and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. On his insistence, we now check IMDB’s content advisory for risky-looking domestic dramas. The final decision though, remains mine. (There was a debate about The Banshees of Inisherin, which despite his anxieties, I won, and we both loved the film.)

Back to Harris. Whilst, in fairness, she has not mentioned PTSD or trauma explicitly, her use of the wheelchair ramp as simile draws on a frequently made assertion that mental illness or afflictions should be treated no differently from physical disabilities; that there is effectively shared experience in having legs that don’t work as normal and a mind that doesn’t work as normal. My views on whether or not I have a “disability” and whether this way of thinking causes more problems than it solves are too complicated to convey in this single article. My gut says it is too much of an oversimplification. In a culture where being nervous doesn’t exist anymore thanks to how easy it is to qualify for “anxiety”, and where instagram shrinks instruct us that a person who is genial, holding down a job well and socially thriving may be, in fact, showing signs of depression as much as a bed-bound alcoholic, it simply spreads any tangibility of mental illness too thin and erases its complexities. The pain of a broken bone and its restrictions is pretty consistent amongst sufferers. The pain of depression has a lot more layers.

There’s a more cynical implication in Harris’s analogy. Only a monster would make a case against wheelchair ramps and therefore so, apparently, would it take a horrid individual to deprive those who allegedly need trigger warnings just as much. Well, in language the likes of Harris will understand, let me pull out my lived experience card and state emphatically the two things are not the same. And this would apply if Harris’s trigger warnings pertained to gravely disturbing plot points e.g. graphic depictions of rape and battery. The fact the kind of things being flagged are “death of a parent” — a difficult rite of passage and near-universal experience — strongly indicates she subscribes to the free-for-all definition of what it means to be “triggered”, lumping in feelings of great discomfort, sadness or mild disturbance with debilitating, paralysing mental crises or panic attacks due to sensory flare-ups of life-threatening experiences.

My living with PTSD is not something I disclose eagerly, in personal circles let alone this publicly, partly because I don’t want anyone to look at me differently, underestimate my resilience or, God forbid, sense of humour. Mainly though because the outrageous cheapening of the word “trigger” — a term that lest we forget, once really did mean something — coupled with the rise in self-diagnosis makes me, frankly, embarrassed at the attention-seeking associations the condition now carries. The focus of dissidents of trigger warnings understandably tends to be how they encourage unnecessary destructive fragility in people. More acknowledgement of how much damage and drowning out of the perspectives of those who actually have PTSD would be very welcome.

How Harris wishes to patronise her readers is her business, but hopefully no other authors follow suit. More concerning is her previous suggestion that other authors should also adopt trigger warnings, presumably using the same vague and undefined criteria for what counts as triggering content. If she is to be taken as some kind of authority on the matter, it would be amiss not to point out that for all her concern about “outdated terms for the travelling community” in Chocolat and “ableist and transphobic language” in her short story Little Mermaid, she was content as chair of the Society of Authors to look sneeringly away at the waterfall of rape and death threats J.K.Rowling received over her vocal support for women’s rights, yet another indicator her comprehension of the kind of words that have the capacity to harm might be lacking. 

I appreciate the struggles of living with C-PTSD will vary. I cannot and do not speak for all in the — first and last time I’ll ever use this phrase — PTSD community. I’ll tentatively say this though. Those with visceral understanding of the day-to-day ramifications of real, terrifying trauma — even for someone whose life worked out as stupidly lucky and happy as mine has — will know that encountering something mildly unpleasant in media or texts is amongst the least of our worries.