Panic Attack

by Robby Soave

  “I have seen a level of comfort to talking openly about mental health issues that I’ve not experienced before,” Kayum Ahmed, a doctoral fellow at Columbia University, told me. “And I do see that as a positive. I think that students are now more likely to engage openly with professors and teaching assistants about the mental health challenges that they face, which they may not have been able to do previously.”

  People who need help shouldn’t be afraid to ask for it. But at so many campuses, it has begun to feel like mental instability and trauma are the norm—that students are encouraged to see themselves as sick and vulnerable, and so they do. They have fully appropriated the language of mental illness. When students don’t like something, they talk about how it triggers a kind of self-diagnosed PTSD.

  Intersectionality provides a partial explanation for why this may be so. Think of an LGBT activist: this individual suffers under just one kind of oppression. A black LGBT activist, on the other hand, can claim two. A black LGBT activist with PTSD, though, can claim a third type of oppression. This person has much more cultural cachet among the activist crowd, which is probably why online biographies of academic activist types often list the mental issue the person suffers from. Mental disorder–based oppression is much easier to add to one’s oppression resume, of course; it’s hard to falsely claim to be a person of color and get away with it (though that hasn’t stopped some from trying; we’ll discuss Rachel Dolezal at a later point), but it’s comparatively easier to say that you’ve been traumatized, or triggered, or made to feel debilitatingly depressed by the suffering you’ve witnessed.

  Kathryn, a UC Berkeley student, told me she wouldn’t feel safe attending a meeting of a conservative political group on campus. I asked her if she meant that she worried they might attack her. No, it wasn’t that, she said. I then asked if she thought they might say something she found hurtful.

  “Yes, exactly,” she said. “They’re going to trigger me. They know what they’re going to do.”

  To deal with triggers, activists have borrowed an interesting solution from the world of social media. “Trigger warnings” actually originated on the internet, first appearing on feminist websites, where they would warn readers that they were about to encounter an article that could “trigger” a person who had experienced the kind of trauma described in the article: an eating disorder, for instance, or sexual assault. The idea is straight out of mental health psychology: people who have experienced deeply disturbing, traumatic events may undergo intense emotional pain—flashbacks, anxiety, depression—when exposed to stimuli that evoke memories of the initial trauma.

  “We have students that have experienced sexual assault that have PTSD,” Jacqueline, an Evergreen State College student, told me. “Sometimes if a student gets a warning beforehand that the thing that they’re about to read has, say, sexual assault in it, it has a mention of that or it portrays that, then the student can do what they need to do on their own time to prepare themselves to actually handle that work. It’s not asking for an exemption from the work, but just providing potential avenues for students.”

  Unfortunately, triggers are not always as obvious as, say, reading about sexual assault if you are a sexual assault survivor. Colors, noises, and smells can trigger PTSD as well.

  “In psychological parlance, a trigger can be any stimulus that transports a PTSD sufferer back to the original scene of her trauma,” wrote Katy Waldman in Slate. “It might be visual (a red baseball cap like the one an old abuser wore, a gait or facial expression) or aural (a whistle or slamming door). Some people are triggered by the smell of cigarette smoke or traces of a specific perfume. Others react to spoken or written language: words that switch on the brain’s stress circuits, bathing synapses in adrenaline and elevating heart rate and blood pressure.”22

  It can prove difficult in practice to forewarn people about the vast swath of potential human activity that could conceivably provoke discomfort. Trigger warnings had already worn out their welcome among some observers as far back as 2010, when the sex blogger Susannah Breslin accused feminists of using them “like a Southern cook applies Pam cooking spray to an overused nonstick frying pan.”23 But years later, the hunger for trigger warnings has spread.

  According to the New Criterion, some 63 percent of surveyed students supported mandatory trigger warnings. It has become one of the most common requests by students, and is frequently included on their lists of demands. Activist students at the University of Arizona said “potentially problematic” classroom material should come with a trigger warning and an alternative assignment, and that these were “demands, not simply requests or suggestions.”24 I have seen similar demands for mandatory trigger warnings from students at American University, Rutgers University, and countless other colleges. The student government at the University of California, Santa Barbara, approved a resolution demanding trigger warnings, and Oberlin College briefly instated such a policy before cooler heads prevailed.

  Flashy, obvious plots to codify trigger warnings invite derision and are frequently torn apart by right-leaning media outlets. But subtler policies survive, often going unnoticed until a professor runs afoul of spoken or unspoken policies. At Drexel University, for instance, the sexual misconduct policy notes that professors are expected to “offer appropriate warning and accommodation regarding the introduction of explicit and triggering materials used.”25

  Jacqueline told me she doesn’t want trigger warnings to be mandatory, but she thinks there should be “a way for students to ask for them and feel like that is welcome in their classrooms.”

  But it bears repeating that there’s no real evidence such an approach is beneficial for students’ mental health. Psychologists generally recommend gradually exposing patients to psychological triggers—albeit in a controlled environment, rather than a classroom—in order to help them overcome their traumas. If a person is truly in danger of fainting at the first encounter with a trigger, that person needs actual therapy. But for the vast majority of students who are perfectly mentally healthy—despite what they might tell themselves—trigger warnings seem less justified.

  Angus Johnston, a historian of student activism at the City University of New York, thinks the negative reaction to trigger warnings is considerably overblown. Johnston uses trigger warnings in his classroom, though he prefers to call them “content notes.”

  “I basically say at the beginning of the semester that there is going to be some material that we cover in, say, a world history class that some students might find challenging on an emotional level or difficult to deal with in terms of the emotions that it produces,” Johnston told me. “We’re going to be talking about stuff like lynching and rape and children dying.” If any of these subject matters will prove difficult for a student for some reason, that student should talk to Johnston about it beforehand, he recommends.

  Johnston gave the example of discussing in class a powerful piece of writing by Charles Darwin in which the scientist attempted to memorialize his ten-year-old daughter, who had died of scarlet fever. “If there were a parent in my class who had had the experience of losing a child in the recent past, I would want to know that before I entered into a conversation about a document like that, because I wouldn’t want to cause somebody unnecessary pain,” Johnston told me.

  Some students, though, have weaponized their triggers to make life difficult for professors who make them even slightly uncomfortable. I have spoken with many academics—even some very far-left ones—who think their students use the language of oppression and trauma in order to get their way.

  Take Helen, an acting and theater instructor at a liberal arts college in the Northeast, who told me, “It really feels like teaching in the McCarthy era.” Three years ago, she experienced the most bruising semester of her teaching career: her students’ passive-aggressive helplessness nearly drove her insane. “By the end, I was so drained and exhausted I wasn’t even a good or professional teacher anymore,” she said. (Hel
en spoke with me on condition of anonymity, and I have changed her name.)

  Helen’s difficulties were eye-popping: her incredibly privileged, mostly white, perpetually offended students made acting class a living nightmare. Their refusal to take on roles that challenged them, their incredible sense of entitlement, and their constant assertions that the material was too traumatizing made it impossible for Helen to teach.

  Helen’s course is an acting class: students are required to act out different roles and then write reflection papers about the experience. One day, Helen asked a student to play a disabled character—something the student handled with remarkable sensitivity, Helen recalled. But when it was over, half a dozen other students ambushed Helen. They told her the lesson was entirely inappropriate.

  “This was six totally able white students,” said Helen.

  For Helen, the irony was particularly pronounced, given her background. Before transferring to her liberal arts college, Helen worked at a less elite school in a different part of the country. Its students came from humbler origins: many, in fact, were veterans who had just returned from combat in the Middle East.

  “They were right on the front lines of Afghanistan, came back, and five days later were sitting in my classroom,” said Helen. “Not a single person told me they had PTSD.”

  Not a single person—until Helen moved across the country and arrived at her new job. She was shocked to discover that the considerably more privileged and wealthy students at the liberal arts college routinely claimed to be suffering from vague mental health issues.

  “Ten people have told me they are claiming trauma,” she said. “They are getting diagnosed with it.”

  These were privileged students participating in an acting class. An acting class. Once, Helen asked two female students to act out a scene between a husband and a wife. The scene required that the husband, at one point, push the wife onto a bed.

  In her reflection paper, the woman who played the husband accused Helen of retraumatizing any survivors of sexual assault who might have witnessed the performance. The student reasoned that no one in an acting class should ever be asked to play such a role. She also revealed that the student playing the wife had later visited the counseling center “to process the trauma it had brought up for her.”

  Concerned for this student’s health, Helen met with her and asked why she hadn’t expressed any opposition to playing the part beforehand. The student maintained that she had dropped hints—a statement that exasperated Helen. “I’m being dropped hints by sixteen different people with opposing needs!” she said.

  This was not the end of the complaints. The student playing the husband also lamented that the nature of the casting—two women—had essentially forced her to play a lesbian in front of the class, which traumatized her as well. This confession confused Helen, since the young woman had previously talked very openly about having a girlfriend.

  One can imagine the difficulty of trying to teach while accommodating the triggers and mental health issues of dozens of different people. And yet this is exactly what teachers are increasingly expected to do.

  “Acting is about asking people to step out of their own bodies and into other people’s lived experiences,” said Helen. “A lot of what we do is trigger people into connecting with things. Those are uncomfortable feelings.”

  In college, the learning process really does require students to explore troubling issues. There just isn’t a reliable way to talk about complicated issues of identity and politics without provoking offense—and if there was, it would not necessarily be to students’ benefit. Some lessons should cause discomfort.

  That doesn’t mean students should always be required to undergo educational ordeals that deeply disturb them. It makes sense to allow someone who has endured a truly traumatic experience to avoid acting out a directly related scene. Limited exceptions can be made for students with special needs. But when all students see themselves as having special needs—and all aspects of the human experience are considered potential traumas—it’s simply impossible for the university to function. Teachers need to be allowed to exercise meaningful control over the classroom.

  Helen’s difficulties, of course, were not confined to the classroom. Her students frequently demanded to meet with her outside of class, for no reason other than their desperate need for validation. In Helen’s view, they just wanted her to tell them they were good at acting. (I’m reminded of an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia—the show is basically Seinfeld for a younger demographic—where Kaitlin Olson’s character, Dee Reynolds, a pathetically incompetent wannabe actress, asks her therapist, “Tell me I’m good, tell me I’m good, tell me I’m good, tell me I’m good,” over and over again until the therapist breaks.)

  “It’s an unlimited well of personal attention for them,” said Helen. “And no degree of shame asking for it.”

  By the end of the semester, anytime Helen received a request for an out-of-class meeting, she would demand an explanation of the purpose for the meeting. She estimated that she had twenty people a week begging her for extra attention.

  The students’ need for reassurance was exceeded only by their fear of negative feedback. Helen asked one student to change the tone of her voice when acting out a role. In her reflection paper, this student attacked Helen for suggesting that her normal voice wasn’t good enough—that there was something wrong with her. Students assigned to play characters unlike themselves accused Helen of invalidating their experiences. Students assigned to play characters too much like themselves felt as though their fitness as actors was being questioned.

  Meanwhile, the college continued to stress the paramount importance of accommodating students, and offered training workshops that hit upon these themes. Helen and her colleagues were reminded that racism, classism, sexism, and all the other isms are toxic influences that must be rooted out of the academy.

  It’s not so much that this view is wrong—racism is, in fact, bad. But according to Helen, the workshop utterly failed to explore the trade-offs and tensions between policing racism and permitting uncomfortable expression. The directives were entirely one-sided.

  Helen stressed to me that some students’ grievances were legitimate. But signing up for an acting class should require, in some sense, enough mental fitness to, well, study acting. One wouldn’t encourage a student who fainted at the sight of blood to become an ER doctor, or a student with a debilitating fear of spiders to become an arachnologist.

  Helen is not the first professor to make this complaint. She isn’t even the first theater professor. The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller visited Oberlin College to interview students and professors. His conversation with Roger Copeland, a professor of theater and dance, was illuminating. According to Copeland, in 2014 he criticized a student’s performance during a rehearsal for a play. The student went to Copeland’s department head and accused the professor of creating “a hostile and unsafe learning environment.”26

  “I’m thinking, Oh, God! I’m cast in one of my least favorite plays of all time, ‘The Crucible,’ by Arthur Miller!” Copeland recalled to Heller. He then attempted to argue that no reasonable person could have interpreted his actions as threatening, but the department head explained that this did not matter. Intersectionality holds that each individual is the expert when it comes to his or her own oppression, and so the only relevant evidence was that the student did indeed feel unsafe.

  The Ouroboros

  So far, I have detailed the origins of intersectional theory, explained how certain aspects of Zillennials’ upbringing might make them seem fragile, and described the educational environment that weaves these two threads together into one unified narrative—an activist movement that is simultaneously hypersensitive and militant in its approach to rooting out oppression.

  But in practice, this movement is anything but unified—in fact, it frequently engages in self-cannibalization. Not all victims of oppression get along, since they are qui
te often in tension with each other. The intersectional progressive says: We must fight racism, and sexism, and homophobia, and transphobia, and the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and the wealthy, and global warming, and anti-Muslim bigotry, and ableism, et cetera, et cetera. There are millions of people, though, who want to fight some of these things but not others—and if intersectionality requires them to commit to every single cause at once, they simply won’t. Some people might decry racism and sexism without fully understanding or agreeing with the demands of the trans community; indeed, there’s even a community of feminists who specifically reject the notion that trans women should be considered women (more about them in Chapters Four and Five). Other people might want economic equality for the poor but hold socially conservative views on gay rights, or oppose Trump’s harsh treatment of immigrants but feel ambivalent about climate change. Still others might be strident progressives in nearly all respects but dissent from the notion that Muslims deserve space in the club when Jews do not. (That’s not a theoretical example. In modern progressive parlance, Muslims are oppressed and Israel is the oppressor. Thus anti-Islamic bias is viewed as a source of oppression, while anti-Semitism is frequently ignored—even though Jews tend to be much more liberal than Muslims.)

  There are three main problems with intersectionality: the education problem, the perfection problem, and the coalition problem.

  First, the education problem. One important implication of intersectionality is that the sole authority on an individual’s oppression is the individual in question. White men who are heterosexual and cisgender shouldn’t try to “mansplain” the struggles of black women or people of color: they aren’t oppressed, so they can never understand what it’s like, even if they happen to be extremely progressive or well educated about left-wing causes.

  At the same time, “it’s not my job to educate you” is one of the most frequently recited catchphrases in Zillennial activist circles—I’ve heard it time and time again in conversation with activists and in their writings on the subject. “It is not my responsibility as a marginalized individual to educate you about my experience,” wrote Elan Morgan in a post for Medium on this subject, which provided twenty-one reasons this statement was correct.27 Given what we have learned about the Zillennial activists’ relationship with mental health problems, it’s easy to see why they believe this to be the case. Answering questions can be exhausting and triggering—a reminder of past traumas.