Don’t Infantilize
A few brief comments on the patronizing nature of ‘trigger warnings’
Trigger Warning: This is going to be a rant about the absurdity of trigger warnings. If you can’t handle that, tough shit.
I’ve had it up to the moon with this culture of trigger warnings where it regards mental health issues. The very idea that someone with mental health issues needs to be molly-coddled is just fucking insulting. What the vast majority of mentally ill people lack is understanding, NOT CAPABILITY… Now, there’s no question that mental illness is a sensitive subject but requisite understanding won’t emerge if we constantly tiptoe around the issues that the mentally ill need to face in order to develop better ways to cope.
That’s not to say that getting confrontational is the right approach either. I will certainly never forgive or respect again the people in my family who said, quite indignantly, things like “What do you have to be depressed about?” (as if my mental health struggles were somehow an infringement on their rosy delusions of reality) or “You better do something about your depression.” (as if to say ‘my help is a valuable commodity and you better be appreciative’) or simply “You Need Help!” (as if to say ‘I can’t be bothered to spare the time to help you deal with your trauma’).
One of the most important skills that therapists stress is for the mentally ill person to practice confronting their feelings (or lack thereof) and sit in those experiences for a time in order to process them properly, to build resilience against the depression or anxiety or what have you. That’s how any model of skill-building works — you learn some new information and then you take time to process it so that you can properly integrate the new information into your toolbox. It doesn’t matter if you’re a writer, a painter, a plumber or a politician. In fact, it’s why so many professions used to have apprenticeships as entry-level occupations. It was understood that you couldn’t become good at something overnight.
So the best strategy is to be sedate, to be wise and to be open and understanding when it comes to discussing mental illness, always taking care to keep in mind where the person is at in their understanding of the disorder. If they don’t have the words, and neither do you, offer to check books out of the library, or get a subscription to Psychology Today. Or take them to a support group so that they can learn better (NAMI is a good place to start). Your heart may be breaking for the person in front of you but reacting emotionally to an already emotionally uncertain/unstable situation is not a good thing. The depressed child/lover/friend/cousin/acquaintance before you may not know how to articulate themselves and their experiences and the manner in which you treat them could determine whether they get better or get worse, and whether or not they appreciate you for your efforts or bitterly resent you for your ignorance. It’s not an easy undertaking, I’ll admit, but if done right, it can do a world of good for everyone.
