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Lisa C's avatar

Thank you for this. Subscribing now.

In 2021, I had a mental health crisis at the airport that ended in eight police officers beating me black and blue and confiscating my cat*, whom I was traveling with. I don’t remember what I did besides falling asleep on the floor, and I don’t remember resisting arrest, but in the weeks after I was at my most emotionally raw and vulnerable.

I feel grateful every single day that no one filmed the incident and put it online. I’m certain I would have been a danger to myself if, after undergoing a traumatic and humiliating experience due to my psychiatric impairments, I’d also been the laughingstock of the internet.

When I saw Gomas’ video online my heart broke and I worried that she would hurt herself. I’m really relieved to hear that she’s alive and supported. I feel like there’s a shocking level of cruelty in laughing at the mentally ill at their most vulnerable and an immoral level of mercenary profit-seeking in breathlessly churning out monetizable news content on a sick private individual who needs nothing more than space to heal. If I were an editor of a news outlet, I’d be hard-pressed not to fire someone who wanted to run those stories. Just because it’s caught on film doesn’t make it news.

*I got the cat back safe and sound but not easily.

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Peter Gudlewski's avatar

Thank you for this one! I read something about this story last month and was just deeply bothered by what this person would have been going through and how their trauma was being treated.

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