Walmart’s suicide costume is an affront to decency and morality
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| My son at age four |
“Why do you tear me?
Is there no pity left in any soul?”
Is there no pity left in any soul?”
Dante’s
Inferno Canto VIII, John Ciardi
trans.
I’ll never forget the first time my child talked about suicide.
He was four years old, sniffling and shivering after a several-hour fit of
thrashing, incoherent rage. As I rubbed his white-down hair and cuddled him, he
said, “Mom, I don’t want to be anymore. I just want to be a zero.”
Nine years later, when I finally learned my son’s diagnosis, bipolar
disorder, after years of specialists, hospitals, tests, medications, juvenile
detention, and ongoing suicidal ideation, I was relieved. I knew people who
lived with this illness and managed to have successful, happy lives. In fact, one
of my closest friends from childhood, diagnosed with bipolar disorder in
college, had married a wonderful man, raised four children, worked as a
librarian and historian, and was writing her sixth novel.
Many of the 10 million people[i]
in America who are diagnosed with severe mental illness can live healthy,
happy, productive lives. But instead of celebrating their bravery, our society stigmatizes their illness by mocking it in horribly offensive ways.
There’s no time of year mental health advocates dread more
than Halloween.
Every single year, it’s the same thing. Mental illness
becomes the punchline of a joke, or the theme of a horror attraction. This year,
Knott’s Berry Farm and Six Flags did the right thing, shutting down their horrific
asylum-themed virtual reality attractions when advocates expressed justified
outrage. A representative from Six Flags explained the company’s decision to me in an email: “This is a good lesson for us all about perpetuating
stereotypes, and we apologize to anyone that we may have offended.”
This is a lesson that Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer,
desperately needs to learn. A picture of a “razor blade suicide scar wound
latex costume make up” (I won’t link to it, because it is a real trigger) is
the latest and most egregious example of the ongoing battles people with mental
illness and their loved ones must face to educate the public about the reality
of mental health conditions.
Imagine if I told you that my child had an incurable illness
with a risk of death as high as 20% [ii]
If I told you that the illness in question was cancer, you’d be bringing my
family casseroles, organizing community bake sales, and demanding that your legislators
provide more funding for research and treatments.
You’d be outraged by my
inability to access quality medical care for my child. And you would be furiously calling for a boycott if a major retailer released a Halloween costume called “bald head cancer patient
latex costume make up.”
But when I tell you my child’s illness is bipolar disorder,
you back away. The risks and challenges are the same (I know—my father died
from cancer when I was in college). But when I and other advocates express our
outrage about suicide costumes and asylum-themed attractions, you tell us, “Stop
being so politically correct,” or “Can’t you just take a joke?”
No, I can’t just take a joke. To those who don’t understand
why this is all so wrong, I say in all sincerity, I’m glad you don’t. I am glad
that you have never lost a child, or a parent, or a spouse, or a sister or brother or close friend to a
choice-stealing brain disease. Because the pain of that loss never heals.
And I’m glad that you have never had to walk through the
valley of the shadow of death, to come out the other side a survivor, but still
struggling in a society that thinks your illness is “a joke.”
Our pain—and our loved ones’ pain—should never be used for
entertainment or profit. If you think that I am just too thin-skinned—that I
can’t take a joke—I have a Halloween costume idea for you. Go as yourself. You
scare me.
[i]
Serious Mental Illness (SMI) Among U.S. Adults. National Institute of Mental Health. Retrieved from https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/prevalence/serious-mental-illness-smi-among-us-adults.shtml
[ii] Pompili,
M., Gonda, X., Serafini, G., Innamorati, M., Sher, L., Amore, M., ... &
Girardi, P. (2013). Epidemiology of suicide in bipolar disorders: a systematic
review of the literature. Bipolar disorders, 15(5), 457-490.
