“I can’t breathe!” Did George Floyd suffer from cleithrophobia?
Like everyone, I find the sheer lack of humanity, compassion and simple decency surrounding George Floyd’s tragic death staggering. Watching the events play out via the various shop and bystander footage is both confronting and disturbing but it’s also just so incredibly sad.
But there is something else in the footage that has me intrigued. You'll see in the New York Times video that George Floyd is handcuffed and anxious about being put in the police car because he says he is claustrophobic.
All my life I have suffered from what I thought was claustrophobia. A few years ago, I found out that the condition is actually the much-lesser known, cleithrophobia. The two conditions are similar and are often confused—even by those like me who have it—but where claustrophobia is a fear of confined spaces, cleithrophobia is a fear of being trapped, of being restricted and unable to move. The initial sense you have, is that you cannot breathe.
Anyone with cleithrophobia needs to be able to move freely. There cannot be anything between you and an exit; there cannot be anything that holds you down or locks you in. Elevators, crowded buses or trains, aeroplanes, traffic jams, people on the street, concerts, sleeping bags, being dumped by a wave, a locked door...any of these will trigger a slight panic that, depending on the situation and how quickly you can mitigate it, can escalate rapidly. As I mentioned, the sensation is one of being unable to breathe. The first words you usually say when in a panicked or increasingly anxious state follow suit: "I can't breathe."
To someone with cleithrophobia, the thought of being handcuffed is terrifying – and this is where it gets interesting. Before George Floyd is put on the ground or even walked across the street to the police car, we can see that he is already in distress – something the narrator points out at 02:55 in the video. Before the police officers have applied pressure to him, George Floyd is already telling them that he can’t breathe, and he is growing very anxious and collapses on the ground.
While George Floyd’s “I can’t breathe” cry for help has become inextricably linked to the pressure former police officer Derek Chauvin applied to his neck, we know that Floyd was saying this before. It is this behaviour that, as a cleithrophobia sufferer, has me so intrigued. What the police officers saw and reacted to in the most heinous and unsympathetic way, may well have been the rising panic of a man with cleithrophobia being handcuffed and forced inside a police car.
If George Floyd did suffer from cleithrophobia—or even claustrophobia—being handcuffed would have been enough to elicit rising anxiety. Being held down by three adult men and unable to move for any period of time, let alone eight minutes and 46 seconds, would quite literally have been torture. Tragically and criminally, George Floyd’s initial feeling of not being able to breathe, very quickly became a real one.
I don't want to speculate on such a tragic and emotional situation, but while watching the New York Times’ video, George Floyd's behaviour and words jumped out at me and screamed cleithrophobia. There is still much to be written and discussed about George Floyd, police brutality, the riots and protests it sparked, the underlying and blatant racism in the US and elsewhere, the upwelling of emotion from citizens who demand change, and movements like Black Lives Matter, ANTIFA, and Trump’s own Make America Great Again (MAGA).
I would be very interested to see how closely others look at those earlier moments of George Floyd's senseless and tragic death and wonder why a handcuffed man was saying, “I can’t breathe!”
Matthew Smeal is a photographer, writer and videographer who specialises in humanitarian issues.