Today is a day dedicated to treats, tricks, and scares. Halloween is a very commercialized "holiday" that capitalizes on people's fears. But what happens when what people are afraid of are other people?
Every year around this time I see more and more online about mental illness, but it is not what I want to be seeing. Instead I see Halloween costumes letting people dress up as a "schizo," "psycho...," or even an "escaped mental patient."
These are some of them:
This year my town's big haunted house is doing an Insane Asylum theme. They did reach out to me and let me know that it is meant to be a state hospital that closed down 50 years ago leaving the people inside. They said they are not trying to make fun of people with mental illness, but are in the industry of capitalizing on people's fears. She apologized if she had offended me.
I appreciated this and I understand as a business they want to go with what sells. I never thought they were trying to personally attack people with mental illness. I still think it is wrong.
Even if it is meant to be 50 years ago in an abandoned state hospital in which I know patients were treated horribly, they are still portraying people with mental illness with the goal to scare people.
That is the main problem. That the stigma and fear of mentally ill individuals is so powerful that is what would get the most attention.
"People fear what they don't understand." I have grown up hearing that. It is part of the reason I write about mental illness, because so often if their lives have not been touched by it in some way individuals don't know what it is really like.
Part of the reason these Halloween festivities bother me so much is not just because I have mental illnesses. It's because for two years of my life I had the diagnosis of Schizoaffective. It's because I have had psychotic episodes. It's because I have spent considerable amounts of time in mental hospitals.
The types of people being portrayed is me and I am nothing like those costumes or how the haunted house will portray people like me. Most of us who struggle with mental illness aren't.
I have met many many people with many diagnosis during my last few years. When you're in hospitals you have the opportunity to meet a wide range of people. Those opportunities showed me that no matter what the diagnosis attached to them is, people are people. Some just have extra challenges and they work harder than you will ever be able to comprehend to live despite them.
The problem with portraying those with mental illness as scary, violent, and dangerous is that they are such powerful images they become stuck in a persons mind. In reality individuals who have a mental illness are more likely to be the victim of a crime than the perpetrator.
According to mentalhealth.gov "The vast majority of people with mental health problems are no more likely to be violent than anyone else. Most people with mental illness are not violent and only 3%-5% of violent acts can be attributed to individuals living with a serious mental illness. In fact, people with severe mental illnesses are over 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population. You probably know someone with a mental health problem and don't even realize it, because many people with mental health problems are highly active and productive members of our communities."
I understand the appeal to be scary on Halloween. For people who choose to dress up it is one night a year where all of that is socially acceptable, but there are so many costumes out there which are scary (trust me) and don't promote stigma against people with mental illness.
Unlike with a costume we don't get to leave our illnesses in the hamper tonight, but we do have to carry the stigma every single day.
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