Has anyone an example of anyone ever been triggered by reading?
Yes. See my comments above, but to recap: I have a friend with a strong needles/surgery/medical problem. She will absolutely have an unpleasant anxious reaction--entirely physical--if she reads about those things. (It's worse if she sees them; it still happens when reading.) She doesn't like that happening, so she relies on friends and other community (GoodReads is good for this) to tell her which books are safe.
That means she doesn't want to risk picking up something that someone she knows hasn't read. That's a sales limit right there that a publisher or author could overcome by having trigger warnings available somewhere. (They don't have to be on/in the book, but that would obviously be the easiest place for everyone.)
The no context remarks about Half A War stemmed from Joe murdering everyones favorite character and the utter outrage that followed with some fans letting him know they stopped reading at that point and what looked like a concerted effort to downrate the book. The series was YA but those it evoked strong emotion in seem to have been adults. Would you say they were triggered?
No, I'd say they had a strong negative reaction that they are entirely allowed to have as readers. Or are we not allowed to low-rate books whose narrative choices we didn't like now? (I mean... you did just say that if a reader doesn't like something, they put the book down. And I have plenty of reviews on GoodReads that say, "I stopped reading at page (x) when the author did (y).")
They may say they were triggered; I do not believe that is appropriate usage of the term and in fact eclipses those who have genuine trigger problems.
Just a thought but trying to protect people from feeling bad or understanding a full range of emotions may be more damaging in the long run. Perhaps we are meant to be anxious, scared, distressed and afraid some of the time. maybe that is an outlet for past trauma, however painful.
And if every human nervous system worked precisely the same way, perhaps so, but plenty of people have difficulties, whether chemical or emotional or hormonal or from past trauma, that makes certain sorts of being anxious, scared, distressed, afraid WAY worse than it should be, or that other people would experience, and can in fact ruin their day. It seems downright cruel to insist that they take that risk just because there
might be some theoretical downsides to putting a few extra words on a book, or in its imprint page, or somewhere else very unobtrusive.
Let me be clear here: I'm not talking about "protecting people from feeling bad". I'm talking about protecting people from having a panic attack or reliving past trauma. Sure, maybe people might use trigger warnings to avoid reading about sexual assault becuase they just don't want to, but... why is that bad? Like you said, Rostum: they'd just put the book down anyway. Seems to me like it's missing a sale vs getting a one-star review for something the reader didn't want to read. What's worse?