The Mental Patient Halloween Costume: fun in the psycho ward

·
Fun World Costumes Men's Maximum Restraint Costume
by Fun World
$17.46 - $26.24
Some sizes/colors are Prime eligible
2.7 out of 5 stars 16
FREE Shipping on orders over $35
Product Features
... This mental patient costume includes a straight jacket with back ties ...
Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry:See all 4 items

·









Rubie's Costume Psycho Ward Inmate Costume
by Rubie's
$17.78 - $31.99
Some sizes/colors are Prime eligible
2.9 out of 5 stars 7
FREE Shipping on orders over $35
Product Features
... every costume occasion Whether it's for halloween, a themed ...
Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry:See all 4 items

Men's Mental Patient Costume by Dreamgirl
by Spook Shop
$20.99 - $39.99
1.8 out of 5 stars 5
FREE Shipping
Product Features
Costume colors are blue and black
Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry:See all 4 items

·









Don Post Studios Hannibal Lecter Mask
by Don Post Studios
$26.33new(6 offers)
1 out of 5 stars 2
Manufacturer recommended age: 10 Years and up
Product Features
Just add a straight jacket for an easy costume
Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry:See all 4 items

Adult White State Mental Patient Gown Costume
by Costume Stop
Currently unavailable
1 out of 5 stars 1
Product Features
Description: Shed All The Doubt Surrounding Your Mental Clarity
Industrial & Scientific:See all 2 items

·









Adult Green State Mental Patient Gown Costume
by Costume Stop
Currently unavailable
1 out of 5 stars 1
Product Features
Description: Shed All The Doubt Surrounding Your Mental Clarity
Industrial & Scientific:See all 2 items


Blogger's Report. It seems to me that I was just about in the same place as this a year ago. This time I sincerely hoped that Amazon was no longer offering mental patient Halloween costumes, but here they are in all their horrendous glory. Horrendous because they're mocking and making fun of a suffering sector of humanity, and I don't believe any other minority group in that category would receive this kind of contemptuous treatment. Nor would it be tolerated.

But it's still OK! It's still OK because it isn't real. These aren't real people, obviously, or if they are, they are society's throw-aways and thus fair game for this kind of dehumanizing treatment. People really do think this sort of thing is funny and that there is nothing at all wrong with it: it's all good clean lighthearted fun.

Thus Fun World Costumes can offer a Men's Maximum Restraint costume with accessorizing clothing, shoes and jewelry. We have Rubie's Costume Psycho Ward Inmate Costume - and as I write this I have a certain sinking feeling that's hard to describe. The Hannibal Lecter mask, I guess considered OK because it represents a movie character, is for Age 10 Years and Up, for some reason, and there's a p. s.: "Just add a straight jacket for an easy costume." The Adult White State Mental Patient Gown Costume is tagged "shed all the doubt surrounding your mental clarity", but the green version is, unfortunately, currently unavailable.

It seems to me that right now,  mental health issues are where gay issues were in 1970. Not even peeping out of the closet yet, because most of society seems to feel that mental illness, at least mental illness requiring hospitalization, is a topic for contemptuous hilarity. They cannot even begin to imagine the shame that surrounds this subject, the sense that one is useless, worthless, even feared.

 There was a time when cancer was only whispered about, and people who had it were always described as "cancer victims". Now they're survivors, heroes, warriors, that sort of thing. But the "mental patient" is still seen as a broken-down wreck who is fair game for mockery because he or she doesn't really qualify as human.

It would be no good saying my beautiful brother Arthur died from the homelessness brought about by schizophrenia, because he didn't count either, supposedly. He counted to me, and saved me from dying from a toxic childhood. But he drifted loose, there was no help for him, and now, some 35 years later, I am sad to say that things have hardly changed at all.

When someone like Robin Williams dies of despair, we start jumping up and down and furiously telling people they should "reach out for help". I am here to tell you that in the vast majority of cases, there isn't any. What passes for help is contempt, or at very least disdain, being treated like a nuisance or a handicapped child.

I don't get into this "telling my story" stuff much except through fiction. It's boring and it puts people off. People don't care, frankly, how I fought my way back to health, so I won't tell them. The feeling is that I never should have been that way to begin with. Maybe true, but that's how it went down.

Do I sound bitter? About this, yes, I am. Not about everything. What has worked in my life has worked, and is precious to me. It has been what I needed, but seldom what I wanted. Meantime I keep seeing shit like this, and it dismays and infuriates me that it's still acceptable, or at least tolerated. There are no penalties, and year after year, there it is again.  If you object, there is a sort of bafflement, or an accusation that you have no sense of humor or are just plain oversensitive.

May I just wind up by saying that it's not helpful to refer to psychiatric facilities as "psycho wards". That's something out of a Stephen King movie. It's not helpful to dress up in an orange gown pretending to be someone who is probably in unimagineable pain and may have been completely abandoned (though I cannot imagine why). I honestly wonder if things are going to change in my lifetime: I think not, and ten years from now we'll have ever-more-mocking, insensitive portrayals of "psychos" from state hospitals, not really serious of course, oh no, all in good fun, except, hmmm, maybe you'd better not show these things to people whose loved ones have committed suicide.

I'm just sayin'.

POST-POST THOUGHTS. I had this thought about a new sort of Halloween get-up: the Cancer Victim Costume, complete with shaved head, pale makeup for gauntness, IV pole, bucket for nausea (and maybe some hilarious fake barf), scars from ineffective surgery, and then, finally, a tombstone with the victim's name on it. Would that go down well, do you think? Well, why don't you find it funny? I think it might go well with the signs that appear every year on my neighbor's front lawn: THIS WAY TO THE LUNATIC ASYLUM and DANGER! ESCAPED MENTAL PATIENT!

Gotta watch out for those crazies . . . you know?

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

And he glittered when he walked

Richard Cory

BY EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

I remember that we "took" this poem in school, way back in Grade 7 or thereabouts, and the chagrin, the consternation of the class: "But why did he DO that?" "He had everything." "Everyone envied him." "It's not fair." "It's a joke, isn't it?" " That would never happen."

My "favorite" was this lovely statement, which I have heard echoed many times and from many people - I mean adults who should know better, not kids:

"You kill yourself because you're crazy, and you're only crazy if you want to be."

I wonder now, if that kid is still alive, whether he thinks the same way.

I'm not supposed to think about any of this, of course. As one writer said, Robin Williams' death caused many people to suddenly come out of the closet and proclaim, "Yes, me too". But where are they now? No doubt they have retreated in terror, hoping against hope that no one remembers their foolishness.

I've written about this before. Halloween is coming, and in the past I've seen "mental patient" costumes, often with restraints and lurid "nurses" with syringes full of "sedatives". It's funny, isn't it? Come on. Come on, don't you have a sense of humour?

No. If that's what humour is, then no.

My brother was in these "loony bins", "nut wards", etc., on and off for years. I loved him dearly, and by his own admission he was not just crazy but "ca-RAZY". Eerily, I used to compare him to Robin Williams in his madcap ability to riff on outrageous themes, putting on characters and taking them off like masks, only to change at light speed to another subject entirely. One time he did a riff on the '60s TV show The Real McCoys, doing every voice from Grandpa to Luke to Little Luke to Hassie to  Kate to - his personal favorite - Pepino. Some of it was so x-rated that we fell out of our chairs.

He died in 1980, not of suicide as almost everyone assumes, but an accident. Two months later, John Lennon was shot and killed. It was a point of despair in my life.

So what is it about people who seem to have everything, who do themselves in anyway? I think of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, relapsing most awfully into a habit he thought he had beaten. I think of Amy Winehouse drinking a gallon of vodka and poisoning herself at age 27. I think we think they are immune. Not just that they are rich and famous, but loved - aren't they loved, too, I mean by friends and family?

Are they? Is there - is there balm in Gilead?

I have already published a couple of eerily similar photos of Robin Williams with dear friends who hold him so tenderly, he looks like a baby bird fallen from the nest. I once read that people who don't feel loved are like sawdust dolls with a tiny hole in the bottom. It keeps trickling out, almost imperceptibly, until the person is desperate for more supplies to keep from bleeding out.

What got all this started again? Well, it's close to Halloween which makes me think of all those awful mental patient costumes, totally dehumanizing but seen as ghoulishly funny, and CERTAINLY not anything to be offended about.  (You're too sensitive, you know? That's your whole problem.) We don't have Parkinson's or MS or ALS Halloween costumes, but then again, these illnesses are "physical", "real", no one's fault, with the sufferers seen as dignified and courageous, and therefore not frightening or subject to mockery. After all, it would be in very poor taste. 

 It's also from remembering Williams, who seems to have died a very long time ago (but at the same time, only yesterday), but most of all it's because yesterday I bought Billy Crystal's memoir, Still Foolin' 'Em: Where I've Been, Where I'm Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys? It's typical self-deprecating Crystal humour, but not excoriating, with a sweetness, a gentleness that I have always loved about him. In fact, he is my favorite comedian.

He and Robin Williams were best friends. Closer than brothers, in many ways. This book was written and published before his suicide, but on the back is a quote from Williams that now seems poignant and unsettling: "This book is kick-ass funny and truly unique. A Hollywood autobiography with only one wife, no rehab, a loving family, and loyal friends."

I wonder if Williams secretly feared he had none of those things. It's a bit scary that he focused on that, as if to shame himself for having three wives and multiple trips to rehab.  To imply, almost, that Crystal was a superior version of himself - or, at least, not so scarred, not so vulnerable.

I don't want to go much farther into this because I don't fancy triggering off a lousy day of depression. It wouldn't do anything to change the situation. But oh how I wish people would wake up. I thought of a scenario that might have saved him - everyone has a theory, so here goes, here is mine:

He is pacing the floor, both despondent and frantic, knowing there is no way out of the crushing adversity that is coming at him from all sides. Soon he will be paralyzed from Parkinson's, his career will be over, and he won't be able to take part in the cycling that has kept him sane. Rehab did no good at all and made everything worse. He looks back with shame over the battlefield of his life, and for that moment he can't see anything good about it. At all. He has made a mess of things, and there is only one way out.

Though it is agonizing to do, though he has to stand up to an immense shame that is nearly overwhelming, he goes over to the phone, picks up the receiver, dials 9-1-1.

"Hello. I'm going to kill myself. Come get me, please. NOW."

CODA. From Leonard Bernstein's Mass. I used to carry this around written on a little piece of paper. Once a counsellor took it from me and read it in a sing-songy, Betty Crocker voice, then handed it back to me saying, "Oh, that's nice."

I don't know where to start

There are scars I could show

If I opened my heart

But how far, Lord, how far can I go?

I don't know. 

What I say I don't feel

What I feel I don't show

What I show isn't real

What is real, Lord

I don't know 

No, no, no. . . I don't know.