Supermarkets' PR disasters highlight attitude shift

Twitter was ablaze last night as Asda and Tesco attempted to backtrack from a major blunder.

The outrage was directed towards their halloween costumes, Asda depicting a “mental patient”, consisting of a blood stained shirt and a plastic meat cleaver, as well as a heavily disfigured mask while Tesco offered up “psycho ward”, an orange jumpsuit and Hannibal Lecter inspired mask, with a plastic machete as a recommended accessory.

Asda’s idea of a mental health patient

Asda have since tried to correct their error, withdrawing the product and offering to make a donation to mental health charity Mind. Tesco also apologised and removed the costume. However their mistakes and the internet reaction shows the disparity between many businesses and the public when it comes to these issues.

Public attitudes towards mental health have shifted notably over recent years, with the success of Stephen Fry-backed campaign Time to Change and television programming such as the 4 Goes Mad season. With friend of Alan Sugar and Apprentice regular Claude Littner admitting when it comes to people with mental health issues “I would be sad for them and I would not employ them”, it showed up business as being behind the times, while on the contrary the reaction showed that in the real world people are much more accepting of these things.

Tesco’s “psycho ward” costume

Attitudes of bosses like Claude are harmful, as a survey by Mind showed; it found that 22% of those who had disclosed a mental health problem in a previous job said they had been fired or forced to quit. Keeping quiet often isn’t an option, sometimes grounds for dismissal in itself if a time comes when allowances are needed.

I have volunteered for Time to Change myself. The vast majority of those I spoke to doing mental health awareness campaigns were enlightened to the fact that those with mental illness are normal people, just with additional things to deal with in their life. It reflects badly on these supermarkets for not realising how badly something like this would look to the many people with mental health difficulties, or the many more who are friends and family.

For the face of mental illness, you just need to look around and see that sufferers are perfectly ordinary people living otherwise ordinary lives, not meat cleaver wielding, blood stained murderers. For Halloween, I’ll be going as a mental health patient. Same as every other day.