How Netflixs Afflicted Failed the Chronic Illness Community

When Afflicted viewers first meet Bekah Fly, she and her boyfriend Jesse are living in a secluded van in the middle of the California desert. Her severe mold sensitivity makes it difficult for her to reside in traditional homes or apartments, she explains. She only leaves the desert for doctors appointments and otherwise avoids indoor spaces to keep her symptoms, such as asthma, at bay.

In the premiere episode, Fly tells the cameras that the prospect of indefinitely living with her mold sensitivity, on top of chronic Lyme disease, sometimes makes her wish to end her life. In the fourth episode of Afflicted, cameras pan to Flys brother Nick Dinnerstein, who discusses her history of depression and anxiety. Flys parents also make a brief appearance in the series, recalling her experience in a psychiatric ward as a teenager.

Together, the edited scenes forefront Flys mental health, pairing her familys soundbites with those of medical experts who speculate that she and her fellow Afflicted subjects illnesses are the result of psychiatric problems.

When producers first contacted Fly about participating in the Netflix docuseries, she was worried about how the show intended to depict people with chronic illness. So she took a direct approach, she said: I just asked them straight out, Is this going to be a slant of where you have a bunch of doctors calling patients crazy?

According to her, executive producers Dan Partland and Peter Logreco assured Fly that they were committed to telling each patients story with compassion in their seven-episode series. She believed them, and, in 2017, decided to take part in Afflicted. By participating in the show, the 30-year-old New York City native said she was told shed have the opportunity to work with doctors that she couldnt otherwise afford.

Today, she regrets that decision.

In her opinion, producers of Afflicted, which premiered in August, not only misrepresented the extent of her health conditions on screen, but they pushed a singular narrative thats long haunted individuals with a variety of persistent, multi-symptomatic, tough-to-diagnose illnesses: Her sickness is all in her head.

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