It’s that time of year again when the shops start churning out pumpkins, broomsticks, and costumes galore. However, this year a couple of supermarket chains threw a spanner in the works when they began to sell some insensitive Halloween costumes. Near the end of last month, Tesco and Asda made available to their customers ‘Psycho Ward Patient’ and ‘Mental Patient’ costumes. Both supermarkets removed their crude costumes after they received negative feedback from the British public, with the main bulk of this criticism coming from Twitter. Users of the site thought it was not appropriate to sell these costumes in the first place. In reference to Asda’s ‘Mental Patient’ costume, that came with a torn white coat complete with fake blood, a scary mask and a fake meat cleaver, one person tweeted saying, “how on earth did you come to the conclusion that this is an appropriate fancy dress costume? Disgraceful.” Another person also tweeted “@asda I’m a mental health patient. No I am not scary. You should not be selling a ‘mental patient’ outfit”.
Tesco’s costume was equally horrific, as a man brandishing a syringe and wearing a menacing mask appeared on their website. Both supermarkets issued apologies for stigmatizing mental health patients. As a further apology both supermarkets have said that they will make a donation to ‘Mind’, a charity that provides advice and support for people suffering from mental health problems. Asda has announced that ‘Mind’ will be receiving a £25,000 donation, however Tesco has not announced the size of their donation.
This recent controversy highlights the appropriateness of many other Halloween costumes. While it is clearly unsuitable for costumes to reinforce the stigma of mental health patients, could this controversy be stretched to question the suitability of, for example, revealing costumes made for young girls, or the blasé attitude towards blood and by extension death that many small children have when it comes to Halloween?
By and large, Halloween is meant to be a little bit of fun where everyone can get together and get involved. However when incidents like these happen, it dampens the mood and brings to light the self-serving nature of society today. However, this incident has brought the issue of stigmatizing mental health disorders into the spotlight and allowed people to scrutinize these outdated attitudes.
Photo credits: www.bbc.co.uk, www.cca-global.com