You are right that the warnings on The Cat Lady are sadly lacking, but I wanted to make the point that content warnings in and on themselves doesn't lessen the people's experiences of media.
With news pretty much everyone are aware that reports of rape, suicide and child abuse will appear when such things happen, and in Sweden at least, they do come out with a quick warning that "the following may be disturbing to certain viewers" before going into detail or showing footage from warzones, injuries and so forth.
And I'm not asking for a super long and detailed list of anything that could possibly offend anyone, I'm specifically asking for a warning regarding the single most common cause of PTSD,
it's not an obscure phobia only affecting a handful.
And even if the scene in question didn't show anything explicit, it was still troubling because the game gave you a customizable blank slate character and strongly encouraged you to project yourself onto them, and then makes you specifically choose how your character would react to what looked like a traumatic event, and that makes it far more upsetting than merely having a character you don't play as mention sexual abuse without forcing you to give your input and role-play as them.
Once again, I'm
not asking to censor anyone or preventing writers from depicting dark or adult subjects in games, but I think it's unfair that people already suffering from depression, PTSD or any other crippling mental disorder should be forced to do meticulous research before being allowed to find escapism to alleviate their conditions, and when it comes to basically anything that isn't media, the responsibility is on the creators to warn the customers about any eventual risks before using their products. All manners of equipment, chemicals and tools all comes with warnings on how to prevent injuries from using them wrong, and just because mental injuries aren't visible it doesn't mean that the pain isn't less real than cutting or burning oneself.
All I ask for is that
specifically sexual abuse, graphic torture, child abuse and suicidal thoughts in characters you play as gets labeled with a quick content warning,
and I don't see why this would be an unreasonably difficult thing for content creators to do.
And while a site dedicated to listing PTSD triggers in media isn't a bad idea, the problem is that not everyone will know how to find the site, if they even know that the site exists at all, and it still places the burden on the people suffering. There is also the matter of how to moderate such a site in order to prevent trolls from willfully misrepresent content or spread false information. I'd like to have a reliable site for this purpose, but that cannot be a full substitute for also having content warnings on store pages.
There is also still the social stigma against mental illness in society, where people still claim that it isn't real or that those who have it should just "tough it out" and learn to deal with reality, and in some way the knee-jerk reaction many have against content warnings is a continuation of that stigma. I ask that you try and imagine that, whenever there was something like child abuse on screen, it would feel like a knife inside your brain. You can't ignore it and you can't choose it away, it's the sharp carving feeling of a knife in your brain and that feeling lingers a long time even after you stop watching, and you have no reliable way of telling which games, movies or other media could cause this beforehand, wouldn't you too want a reliable way of content warnings too?
Apologies if this is getting off topic but - no one is saying that *only* games should provide content warnings. Movies do have content warnings already and (in the UK at least) TV news regularly warns people in advance if the content of a report is likely to be disturbing.
I couldn't agree more and I have had a problem with books too with detailed descriptions of rape or murder, and I think that all media should have content warnings if they portray things that warrant it.