One tricky thing here is that existing literature is really examining the potential effects of trigger warnings in and of themselves, devoid of context or non-immediate decision making. Does seeing a literal trigger warning make someone feel less anxious? Almost certainly not, why on earth would it?

In studies that find no or slight negative effect, the outcomes are immediate measures. How do you feel right now? If it assesses decision making, it’s whether you do or do not immediately consume the content.

But for trauma survivors the potential to be triggered is always in flux, always dependent on everything else going on in your life, often set off by things that seem unrelated or irrational. Trigger warnings give someone a choice in that exact moment for what to do based on what they believe they can* manage. Yes, it may promote avoidance, but avoidance can increase feelings of agency that allow for reduced avoidance behavior in the future.

As an example from the great college campus syllabus trigger warning kerfuffle: I assign chapters from Durkheim’s Suicide in some seminars, as well as complementary readings with less obvious titles. My students get a warning about this ahead of time, but they don’t get to just skip that part of the class. Some things students have done: scheduled extra therapy sessions during those weeks, read in small groups in the library instead of isolated in dorm rooms, missed a class meeting and made up for it with office hours and a short additional assignment (so they didn’t out themselves to their peers with a panic attack in class). It’s about agency and self-assessment.

A screen with a suicide hotline number isn’t going to magically make someone ok with seeing suicide represented, but it offers an action the person can take to regain agency.

*Or just want to manage. Sometimes you’re just living your life and not super in the mood for exposure therapy, and if you can get your brain somewhere else for a while that’s a very good thing.

For now absolutely. He’s been a real gift to IL. But I would be all in on a Pritzker/AOC ‘28 or ‘32 ticket.

Please introduce me to the woman who is doing IVF without first learning about cycle tracking and timed intercourse.

The idea that someone undergoing IVF has not yet tried everything else first is extremely bizarre. It’s wildly expensive and extremely hard on your physical and mental health.

This makes me want to go back on Reddit just to see what r/infertility and r/IVF have to say.

(I say this as I am currently prepping for my 5th freeze-all IVF cycle to make embryos I can’t even put in my own uterus because a doctor did a thing that left me infertile following a miscarriage years ago. Nobody wants to go through this shit. We do it because it’s the next least-worst thing on the list of things to try.)

Seconding this plea to ignore anyone telling you to force or withhold food. The whole “they’ll eat it when they’re hungry enough” may apply to many picky eaters, but if someone (kid or adult) eats an extremely limited or unusual diet like you’re describing in the comments, there is a good chance it may be ARFID. It’s an eating/feeding disorder that often goes along with autism or sensory processing disorders, but can be separate. Critically, the “tried and true” parenting strategies for breaking picky eaters will exacerbate the problem. Of course the answer also isn’t “let them eat McDonald’s all day and stop worrying,” but there are a lot of strategies for supporting someone (especially kids) to expand their list of safe foods in a low-risk high-reward way.

Like the commenter above me said, everyone who has/had ”issues with food” is going to have an entirely different list of what they can and can’t eat and a different set of strategies that worked or backfired for them. The only general advice I have that I think applies across the board is: lower the pressure. If someone only eats 2 or 5 or 10 things, every interaction with food is already very high stakes and takes up a lot of brain space. You’re probably not going to be able to make specific foods less scary, but you can make the environment safer. Never make an unsafe food the only option, don’t let them see how worried you are, don’t (like my mom did) tell them “scientists found that if you eat more than one hot dog a month you get cancer” or “if you don’t eat vegetables you’ll die before you turn 20.” And maybe counterintuitively, don’t act overly surprised or excited when they are curious about a new food, aren’t afraid of something, like a food now that they insisted they didn’t like, etc. Just go with it as a win for you both. Let them see that what happens when they can eat more food is just…they can eat more food. No drama. (Exception if they are already excited and you are following their lead.)

Resources like NEDA (in the like above) can point you toward some places to start and connect you with other parents and professionals who can offer more contextualized and specific advice. You might also look at the r/ARFID subreddit. It’s mostly adults supporting each other but there’s a lot of wisdom for concerned caregivers and loved ones as well.

Just to add clarity to what I think the person above was saying, a lot of the conditions SLPs help treat have nothing at all to do with the voice or language. For example someone who has no changes or problems with their speech whatsoever but has problems swallowing may get benefit from seeing an SLP who is a Board Certified Specialist in Swallowing and Swallowing Disorders (BCS-S) and primary/exclusively treats patients with dysphagia.

That said I have no opinion whatsoever on whether that is relevant or useful to you. Just clarifying the misleading nature of “speech” front and center in “speech therapist.”

Unironically worth much more of my attention than the article. I need more elephants in jeans. Are there equivalent donkeys in jeans? If not, let’s call out the rampant media bias and do something about it (specifically making more images of animals wearing jeans).

I spent longer than I want to admit trying to make a pun with AI as “the elephant in the room” to talk to about to my students about which ways of using LLMs are unacceptable/acceptable/encouraged on the first day of class. I couldn’t do any better than AI-lephant. I even asked chat GPT for help. Very disappointing.

If you’re in a one on one conversation with another person where the intention of both parties is for you to learn something from them, the idea that you should just sit and wait and hope is silly at best and actively detrimental at worst.

You do want to avoid interrupting at awkward moments so you don’t make them forget what they’re saying or irritate them with a question they are going to answer in the next two words. But it’s pretty simple to avoid those (or more importantly, to demonstrate to the other person that you are INTENDING to avoid them, even if you make mistakes). Three big things:

1. Pay attention to tone of voice, including speed and volume. People will usually slow down, soften their voice, and shift their pitch off neutral (raising or lowering) to sort of “open the floor” for constructive interruptions without outright stopping. That’s the ideal spot to jump in.
2. Be practical about the content of what’s being said. If you have a question about one thing but you see that your partner is clearly moving on to a totally new thing - interrupt them. Even if you do have to be pretty abrupt with it, this is still a “constructive interruption” because it helps both speakers stay on the same page and have an efficient interaction.
3. Backchannel your intentions. Someone else mentioned that backchanneling include minor interruptions — things like nodding, saying “oh wow,” “yeah totally” — that don’t actually take the floor away (the other person doesn’t have to stop talking to give you space). Another kind of backchanneling is using small soft vocal signals (“hmmm” “oh uh well…”) to give the other person the chance to stop and let you ask a question. You don’t force your way in; they can finish their thought but see that they shouldn’t move on yet. Aside from soft vocalizations, these kinds of cues also include laughter, facial expressions (puzzled, skeptical, surprised, etc), eye gaze (either suddenly looking away or suddenly looking right at the person), and gestures (tilting your head to one side, doing a “mouth shrug,”

I study conversational gestures and backchannel a for a living, so I’ll add that my personal favorite tool here is a modified shrug. Tilt your head a little, extend your upturned hand or pointed finger out toward them (but like, softly and not at or near their face, just in neutral space), maybe raise one shoulder a little optionally, and just hold it there. They will read it as a request to metaphorically pass the turn to you the same way they’d pass you the salt.

One of the biggest cliche revisionist histories I know of is “Jack of all trades, master of none; often much better than master of one.” It’s an interesting one because it’s been retconned twice.

You’ll hear people respond to first line by saying “um actually the second line of the poem totally changes the meaning.” Yes, it did change the meaning when it was added in the 21st century, 400-500 years later.

Then you’ll hear people one step closer to accuracy who correct “Jack of all trades” by reminding the speaker that it’s not a compliment because it ends with “master of none.” Except the master of none bit wasn’t used until the 18th century, and the second revision with the couplet may actually closer in meaning to the original!

The original, simple phrase “jack of all trades” was first used in that form in the 16th century, possibly as a reference to Shakespeare, and definitely as a phrase that was intentionally ambiguous about whether it should be interpreted as a compliment or insult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_all_trades?wprov=sfti1#Origins

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Holy shit finally. I’m a professor and my office is Room 404 of a building that’s a completely impossible maze. Students routinely show up 15 minutes late unable to locate my office, and I have tried so desperately to get literally anyone to laugh at my “Error 404 Room Not Found” jokes with no success.

Please tell me “pliers” is the term for “tweezers” outside the US.

The article says a lot more than the obvious, and really has very little to do with the topic of placing children in foster care. It’s not claiming infants shouldn’t be removed from unsafe homes or trusted to foster parents as long as those homes remain unsafe. It’s saying the foster system is being manipulated to the detriment of children, birth parents, and foster parents. The main family in this article is a shining example of when placing a child in foster care works perfectly, where the parents expediently turned things around and managed to bond with their child despite the tragic circumstances. The goal of foster care is to reunite families, and even in these ideal cases it’s easy to turn the system against its own goal.

The way you’re describing it sounds like a step past the standard “super taster” experience. Especially if you already know you’re prone to hypersensation in taste (or tactile), you might look into learning more about ARFID, an avoidant-restrictive type eating/feeding disorder. Many kids who don’t grow out of being picky eaters (or even get worse) aren’t as much “picky” as they are literally unable to swallow or keep down most food. There’s been more education about it (especially in adults) recently, leading to a lot of adults having a “holy shit I’m not the only person in the world like this?!” moment. There’s a decent community on Reddit if you’re curious about others’ experiences (though being Reddit there’s also some wildly uncalled for aggressive armchair diagnoses, groupthink, and misinformation, soooo grain of salt).

Mystery solved.

I’m imagining you sending off your dirty laundry to relatives for their birthdays, which is probably not what you mean. Does hamper mean something different for you?

Or the racial and economic disparities in access to abortion and other family planning resources.

Or along a totally different line, that “children with married parents” is an overlapping but non-identical group to “children in a 2-parent household.”