![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
via https://ift.tt/2NtsFud
becausefuckfibro:
A few words about Afflicted, because the spoonie community has got so many words to get out about this shitshow.
If you’ve missed it, Afflicted is a new docuseries on Netflix that follows several people experiencing chronic illnesses and the measures they take to find relief and, dare it be said, cures. A comment frequently made by the subjects is that Western medicine has been woefully inadequate for what they have been going through, and so they are shown exploring alternative medicines, substantial changes to their ways of living, and tests and treatments that aren’t well known beyond conventional modern medicine. As the series go on, supplemented by edits of commentary from ‘specialists’, it becomes clear that these measures are being used by the documentarians as reason to mock them and dismiss any legitimacy to their conditions.
All the documentary’s subjects have since come out on social media, upset by the way they were portrayed in the final edits, and discuss how they and their supports were manipulated by the people who claimed to have an interest in sharing their stories. Most recently, Jake hosted a livestream Q&A that you can watch on YouTube.
One of the only things Afflicted did successfully was validate and encourage the stigmatization of people who are chronically ill. The scrutiny, skepticism, and dismissal we experience on a daily basis from the medical and social communities alike has already been painful and a totally unnecessary burden. Afflicted doesn’t give people with chronic illnesses a voice - it amplifies the voices of people who want to tell us it’s “all in our heads” and supports comparisons on “who’s really sick”. It lets people talk even more about us and not to us. It merges us into one character in a cautionary tale about overactive imaginations and attention-seeking.
It promotes a supposed specialist telling viewers that we become attached to our ‘roles’ as chronically ill people and that failing to be cured by routine medicine means we have committed to a subconscious need to be sick.
It tells viewers that we should be pitied for our inability to exist in a reality that doesn’t match theirs.
It warns our loved ones that we are probably just manipulating them in one way or another, either to cling to them or reject them entirely.
It portrays the chronically ill as merely being victims of trauma and labouring from the inability to just get over it.
We are reduced to oddities, burdens, lunatics.
Our illnesses and the things we do to try and have any semblance of control over them when all else fails are indulgent and entitled.
So yeah, fuck Afflicted.
(Your picture was not posted)
becausefuckfibro:
A few words about Afflicted, because the spoonie community has got so many words to get out about this shitshow.
If you’ve missed it, Afflicted is a new docuseries on Netflix that follows several people experiencing chronic illnesses and the measures they take to find relief and, dare it be said, cures. A comment frequently made by the subjects is that Western medicine has been woefully inadequate for what they have been going through, and so they are shown exploring alternative medicines, substantial changes to their ways of living, and tests and treatments that aren’t well known beyond conventional modern medicine. As the series go on, supplemented by edits of commentary from ‘specialists’, it becomes clear that these measures are being used by the documentarians as reason to mock them and dismiss any legitimacy to their conditions.
All the documentary’s subjects have since come out on social media, upset by the way they were portrayed in the final edits, and discuss how they and their supports were manipulated by the people who claimed to have an interest in sharing their stories. Most recently, Jake hosted a livestream Q&A that you can watch on YouTube.
One of the only things Afflicted did successfully was validate and encourage the stigmatization of people who are chronically ill. The scrutiny, skepticism, and dismissal we experience on a daily basis from the medical and social communities alike has already been painful and a totally unnecessary burden. Afflicted doesn’t give people with chronic illnesses a voice - it amplifies the voices of people who want to tell us it’s “all in our heads” and supports comparisons on “who’s really sick”. It lets people talk even more about us and not to us. It merges us into one character in a cautionary tale about overactive imaginations and attention-seeking.
It promotes a supposed specialist telling viewers that we become attached to our ‘roles’ as chronically ill people and that failing to be cured by routine medicine means we have committed to a subconscious need to be sick.
It tells viewers that we should be pitied for our inability to exist in a reality that doesn’t match theirs.
It warns our loved ones that we are probably just manipulating them in one way or another, either to cling to them or reject them entirely.
It portrays the chronically ill as merely being victims of trauma and labouring from the inability to just get over it.
We are reduced to oddities, burdens, lunatics.
Our illnesses and the things we do to try and have any semblance of control over them when all else fails are indulgent and entitled.
So yeah, fuck Afflicted.
(Your picture was not posted)
