The Scariest Halloween Costume of 2015

This year for #Halloween, I'm dressing up as a
#mentalpatient

5 Reasons Why Making Fun of Mental Illness at Halloween Isn’t Funny 

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. It’s a magic, liminal space between dark and light, where we can explore and play with meaning and identity—we can be witches or fairies, Jedis or Dr. Whos, police officers or surgeons. Also, its central rite is the Great American Candy Swap, and at our house, the kids pay a pretty hefty Almond Joy tax. 

As my husband and I were sorting through our assortment of clown wigs, witch hats, devil’s horns, and angel wings, I told him, “I think this year I’ll shave my head, put on one of those horrible tie-in-the-back hospital gowns, stick a fake IV in my arm, and go as a cancer patient.” 

Ed stared at me. “You’re kidding, I hope,” he said. 

“Better yet, let’s go as the Cancerous Family!” I continued. “We can put skull caps on the kids and make them look just like poster children for St. Judes. Everyone will think it’s hilarious!” 

“Oh, I get it,” he said. “You’re talking about that awful Modern Family Halloween asylum of horror.” 

My husband knows me well. I've experienced two difficult bouts of depression in my life. Now, one of our children has bipolar disorder. Our son has been hospitalized three times, and he has been sent to juvenile detention because of his illness. So we weren’t laughing when ABC ignored the pleas of the nation’s largest mental health advocacy organizations and re-aired the Modern Family “Awesomeland” episode.  

Most of us would agree that making fun of cancer patients isn’t funny. Anyone who has watched a loved one struggle with cancer knows how courageous cancer patients are, and how difficult this illness is. My father’s three-year battle with acute myelogenous leukemia involved experimental drugs that aged him 30 years in the space of months. He died when he was just 50, leaving my mother to raise my four younger brothers on her own. 

But my mother wasn’t completely on her own. She had tremendous community support—cards, casseroles, rides to soccer practice for the boys while she stayed with my Dad in the hospital, mentors for the boys after he died. My dad's insurance covered his pricey medical bills. The community still remembers my father fondly, and mom’s married friends still include her in their social activities. 

While mental illness is no less tragic than cancer, the community support just isn’t there. Instead, individuals and families feel that they have to hide their struggles, which are every bit as heroic as those endured by cancer patients. My father was praised when he took life-prolonging medication with toxic side effects; in contrast, people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder who take life-saving medications with difficult side effects are told they should just “snap out of it” and manage their condition without medication. I’ve experienced this sad truth as a parent of a teenager who has bipolar disorder. Mental illness is just not something we are supposed to talk about. 

Why do we treat mental illness so differently? The science is increasingly clear: mental illness is physical illness.  And yet when I tried to explain to ABC’s Modern Family last year why their tasteless Halloween show was so offensive to me and my son (read “Dear Claire Dunphy” here)  many comments complained about my oversensitivity or dismissed my concerns as “crazy” politically correct extremism. 

Let me break it down for you. Here are five reasons that making fun of people with mental illness at Halloween is not only tacky and politically incorrect, it’s downright cruel: 

1. Mental illness is not a choice. You have nearly unlimited choices when it comes to Halloween costumes. But people who suffer from mental illness do not have a choice about whether they are ill or not.  
2. You wouldn’t make fun of people with other illnesses. Would you think it was funny to dress up as someone with cancer? How about someone in a wheelchair? Or a blind person? Most of us understand that these things are not funny—they’re offensive, and they mock the very real struggles of individuals who are trying to live their best possible lives with very real obstacles. But because mental illness is an “invisible” disability, we discriminate against people who suffer from it, as is evidenced by the “hilarious” television shows we watch and the costumes we wear at Halloween. 
3. The insane asylums of the past actually were sometimes pretty scary—but the new ones, prisons, are even scarier. Why would you want to remind people how bad mental hospitals were? And why aren’t you demanding that we stop sending people to jail because of their brain diseases? It's time we get the community mental health centers we were promised--and provide long-term therapeutic options for patients with more serious illness who are currently warehoused in prisons or nursing homes.
4. People with mental illness are not actually scary. Halloween-shop mental patient costumes, with their straitjackets and gore, reinforce the same false message the media portrays to us by talking about mental illness only within the context of rare events like mass shootings. In fact, when treated, people with mental illness are no more likely to be violent than anyone else, though they are more likely to be the victims of violence.  
5. People with mental illness are not “those people.” They are “us.” An article in The Guardian pointed out this fact by suggesting “scientifically accurate” Halloween costumes for mental patients (hint: dress up like you do every single day, because that’s what people with mental illness look like). 

This year, I’m encouraging my friends to use Halloween to advocate for mental illness in positive ways. On October 31, take a picture of yourself looking fabulous, and tweet it with the hashtag #mentalpatient. Let’s show the world what a real mental patient looks like. They look like you and me.  

But if you decide to dress up as a Modern Family version of a mental patient for Halloween this year, please don’t come trick or treating to my house. You scare me. 

Dear Claire Dunphy

From one soccer mom to another, here’s why your Halloween Insane Asylum of Horror was anything but awesome

I'm going with Awesomeland.

You may remember seeing me at the soccer field, the grocery store, the PTA meetings. Like you, I’m pretty Type A when it comes to raising my kids; for many years, I viewed birthday party goody bags as a competitive sport. But then something happened to my family that I wouldn’t wish on anyone: my second son began to show symptoms of a serious chronic illness.

By the time he was in preschool, we knew something was not right. At first, they said maybe it was autism. Later, they would tell us it was Oppositional Defiant Disorder, or Intermittent Explosive Disorder, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. There were so many labels and different medications! We took parenting classes, got on wait lists for specialists, and restructured our entire family’s life around the child who had an illness, as many families in our situation do. We also became increasingly isolated from our friends and community, as it became harder and harder to manage our son’s behavioral symptoms.

In the midst of the struggles to find an answer, my marriage disintegrated. It was not my son’s fault. But the stress of raising a child with a serious illness can prove overwhelming sometimes. And suddenly, like many other single moms, I was doing it alone. I remember one time at the soccer field, when my son’s shoe came off, and he couldn’t fix it, and he collapsed, wailing and screaming. I will never forget the look of absolute disgust on your face and the faces of other parents that day, the look that said, “What’s wrong with that mom? Why can’t she control her kid?”

Or the time in the grocery store when my son was screaming “Child abuser! Child abuser!” at me and you threatened to call the police and took down my license plate number. Fortunately, the store manager protected me. “I understand,” he whispered to me. “My nephew has autism.”

Or the time you stood at your front window and gawked when I called the police on my own son, because in America, that’s what we have to do when our children have an uncontrolled brain attack. You stared as three policemen put my son in handcuffs and carried him twisting and screaming to the back of their car. You didn’t hear the policeman say to me, “You’re a good mom, ma’am. Never forget that. We know your son needs help, and we will help him to get it.” (God bless our crisis intervention team-trained police department!).

When you found out my son was in an acute care psychiatric hospital, you didn’t offer to watch my other children so I could visit him. You did not bring me a casserole. Mental illness is not a casserole disease, I guess. Fortunately for us, after nine years, my son finally got the correct diagnosis. I was relieved when I found out he had bipolar disorder, because I respect and admire my friends and acquaintances who are successfully managing their bipolar disorder and living productive, happy lives. This was the future I had thought my own child could never have. Suddenly, we had hope.

I’m a soccer mom like you, Claire. And what happened to my child could happen to your child. Mental illness is not a choice or a character flaw. This is why your Insane Asylum was so offensive to me and to my son. It’s not funny to ridicule people who are sick. Worse, the image of mental illness you portrayed is not remotely what mental illness really looks like.

You seemed to recognize your cruel mistake when your neighbor Ronnie lied to you and told you his wife had spent six months in the “cuckoo farm” (lovely words, those). But what about all the real people—children included—who could have been harmed by your Halloween “joke”? What message did you send your own children? My son has worn a straitjacket too, but his was during a behavioral episode. And like many children with mental illness, he has been institutionalized, though we don’t really have insane asylums anymore. We have something far worse: prison. My son was in juvenile detention four times before he was 12 years old, not because he's a bad kid, but because he had behavioral symptoms of a brain disease.

Claire, here are some truly scary facts about mental illness:

•  In any given year, only 20 percent of children who need treatment for psychiatric disorders actually get it. 
• Half of all mental illnesses start before the age of 14. 
•   65-75 percent of youth in juvenile detention have at least one mental illness.
• It costs states $5.7 billion per year in the U.S. to incarcerate an average of 93,000 youth. 
•  There is not a single child psychiatric hospital bed in Orange County. Not one. 
• One in five people with bipolar disorder (what my son has) die by suicide. 
• Worldwide, suicide is the cause of death for more than 800,000 people each year. 
• Adolescent males with mental illness are being shot and killed by police in ever increasing numbers. 

Many people have defended your actions, saying “It’s Halloween! She was just having fun!” Others have accused me of focusing too much on political correctness. But I don’t think I’m out of line in asking for some basic respect from you. We talk a lot about the word “stigma” when we talk about mental illness. But what we really mean is “discrimination.” Your unrealistic and negative portrayal of mental illness perpetuates that “us vs. them” mentality that allows those of us who are not living with it to continue thinking mental illness is a choice, or that it is caused by bad parenting.

So Claire, as a fellow soccer mom, I’m officially asking for an apology. Your Insane Asylum of Horror, had you let it stand, would truly have been the most frightening house in the neighborhood. But for different reasons than you think.

P.S. To the writers of Modern Family: one in five children in the U.S. will suffer from a serious and debilitating mental disorder at some point before age 18. You have five children on your show. I challenge you to introduce mental illness for one of those children into next season’s plot line. You could use your platform to change people’s perceptions about mental illness in real and meaningful ways.