The nightmare of watching Netflix while battling PTSD

Every good Netflix binge needs a few essentials: A take-out feast is a must. Heaps of blankets and pillows will definitely enhance the experience. And you should probably keep a bottle of klonopin nearby, just in case you’re hit with a wave of anxiety and nausea that leaves you shaking and crying for hours.

At least, that’s the checklist for the millions of Americans who live with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a mental illness characterized by flashbacks, nightmares, and panic attacks. When a person with PTSD is triggered, they can experience symptoms ranging from shortness of breath to complete disassociation, a psychological condition marked by feeling disconnected from one’s body.

While PTSD is primarily thought of as a veteran’s illness, the majority of American PTSD sufferers are women. As one of those women, I’ve experienced first-hand the physical and emotional agony of being unexpectedly triggered by a piece of seemingly benign pop culture. For me, attempting to unwind after a long day at work can involve tremendous fear and discomfort. If I want to catch up on what everyone’s talking about—say, an episode of Jessica Jones or How to Get Away with Murder—I have to judge, based on what I know about the show, whether I’m likely to run into upsetting material. I’ll often self-spoil, reading synopses of episodes before I watch so I can be prepared for scenes of violence, abuse, or assault. (An ex teased me for the habit, until I was unexpectedly triggered by a superhero movie on date night.)

The process can be so exhausting, it’s often easier to not watch TV at all. I half-jokingly tell Netflix-and-chill dates that I only watch “documentaries and cartoons,” the least likely genres to send me into spiraling, chest-tightening panic. While a national debate may be raging about the value of flagging disturbing content for so-called “coddled” college students, for trauma survivors, the need for trigger warnings extends far beyond the classroom.

Thankfully, my David Attenborough days may soon be over: I recently learned that an Oakland-based software engineer and assault survivor named Danielle Leong is trying to make Netflix a safer place for people like me—and her—with a new app called Feerless. Leong, 28, designed Feerless to provide the trigger warnings that pop culture doesn’t. Free to download as a Google Chrome extension, Feerless allows users to flag potentially upsetting content in Netflix’s streaming shows, improving the experience for the rest of us. If the show you’re watching is about to take a grisly turn, a small white circle pops up in the corner of your screen—a wordless warning, giving you the option to look away. Users can specify what kind of content they want to be warned about, so whether you’re likely to be triggered by animal abuse or war violence, the app has you covered.

I recently spoke with Leong about the launch of her game-changing new app, living with PTSD, and what’s next for the project.

As a fellow binge-watcher living with PTSD, I can’t tell you how long I’ve wished that something like Feerless existed. Where did the idea for the app come from?

I was watching an episode of one of my favorite shows, Sons of Anarchy, and there was a scene where one of the main characters was gang raped. I have PTSD from a sexual assault and the scene triggered me very badly—I ended up losing about three days of my life. When I came out of the fog, I remember thinking, “If I had known that was coming, I wouldn’t have watched it.” But there just weren’t trigger warnings for TV shows like that.

I remember seeing a list of trigger warnings for the third season of Orange Is the New Black floating around Tumblr and being so grateful, because I could actually get through the whole season, even though there was a major storyline about abuse and several rape scenes.