Getting Mad

I've tried very hard to be offended, but I'm afraid that I just find the whole thing hilariously funny.  I refer, of course, to the 'public outrage' which has forced Asda to withdraw its 'Mental Patient' Halloween costume and Tesco its 'Psych Ward' costume from shelves.  Apparently these costumes - which include, respectively, a blood-stained white coat, mask and plastic meat cleaver, and an orange boiler suit, jaw restraint and plastic machete (pretty good value for around the £20 mark, I'd say) - stigmatise those with mental health problems.  Do they, really?  Both are clearly referencing the popular culture image of crazed killers popularised by horror movies like the Friday the Thirteenth and Halloween series, not to mention Hannibal Lector in Silence of The Lambs (which the Tesco costume is clearly inspired by).  Do those 'outraged' by these costumes really, honestly, believe that anyone actually thinks that these characterisations represent real mental illness sufferers?  The overwhelming majority of people can clearly distinguish between reality and fiction.  After all, we don't see the medical profession, say, getting outraged over Frankenstein films because they stigmatise them all as 'mad doctors' robbing graves and constructing monsters from stolen body parts.  Clearly, such fictional portrayals are ludicrous, just like those of 'mad' killers in slasher films.

If we were to take this issue to its logical conclusion, then we should be banning any film which doesn't give a 'realistic' portrayal of mental health sufferers.  So, out go all those mad scientists, psychopaths and assorted 'eccentric' vampire hunters and the like.  Hitchcock's Psycho would be out, for sure - unrealistic mental health sufferer and use of the stigmatising term 'psycho' in the title.  Which highlights another point: many of the popular terms associated with mental health problems - 'mad', 'maniac', 'crazy', 'whacko' - are in common parlance, but not to describe actual mentally ill people.  If we refer to someone as a 'maniac driver', for instance, we don't mean that they are actually unsound of mind, (or someone who drives maniacs, if we are to be grammatically pedantic), but we all know what is actually meant.  Clearly no slur on the mentally ill is intended with the use of such terms.  Getting back to the original point, as someone who has suffered from clinical depression, which apparently makes me one of those sufferers from mental health problems, I can't say that these Halloween costumes make me feel stigmatised.  I'd agree that their labelling was ill thought out and inappropriate.  If they'd just called them something like 'Serial Killer', 'Meat Cleaver Maniac' or 'Psycho Killer', then I doubt that anyone would have batted an eyelid or sent a tweet.