“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”    The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

It is much easier to hide from yourself than it is to hide from others. Wearing a mask or a façade is easy, but for some it is also a very dangerous thing. When one’s façade begins to crack and crumble, it is all too easy for other to see what might be hiding beneath. I am practiced at wearing and breaking façades. I think if you ask most people they would say that, from time to time, they change their demeanor to match or placate a situation or person. This makes it so hard for those of us who have a mental illness because finding a stable middle ground, a space where we can breathe easily, is often incredibly difficult. When the façade cracks or the mask melts away it feels so exposing. You feel vulnerable.

Being exposed to ridicule and being exposed to the gaze of the world…for having a mental illness, well, that is clearly discrimination, right? The symptoms of distress have been constant fodder for art and literature. Art and literature can be a tool for such good: good for the artist and good for the audience. But this week, in the wake of the Thorpe Park debacle (to put it mildly), I started to think about how subjective the concept of enjoyment is. With literature, there is a tacit understanding of how language can defame or stigmatise a person or group. Often this is the point of the art – to challenge us and to open up debate. Accountability lies with the artist, the editor and the publisher. The same standards should be in place in the media: where someone is under constant threat, libel suits can be filed if stories or editorials imply blame, danger, threat or culpability where there is none. At least in theory, the Leveson Report underlines the importance of the British Press being held to account if their actions are proven to harm, defame or otherwise undermine a person or institution. Perpetuating a lie or a falsehood is a recognizable crime law, but it seems strange that the same accountability does not exist as far as leisure groups are concerned (Merlin Entertainment under which Thorpe Park operates). To whom is Thorpe Park accountable if not the public?

Where does entertainment start and defamation begin? Should I be frightened to be myself, to share with others that I have a mental illness? Is there still a core of society that seriously believes that those for whom inpatient psychiatric is necessary are dangerous and deranged, be-knived and caped, screaming bloody murder to all who’ll listen? The website claims that the experience is ‘a chaotic environment of noise, light and live action’. The trailer for ‘Asylum’ definitely supports this. As actors jump out of the darkness, crudely ‘made crazy’ by lazy makeup and half-arsed pyjamas, the punters are prodded, poked and shrieked at. The core of mine and many others’ concerns is that Thorpe Park is giving the public what they think they already know about mental ill health. If Thorpe Park or Merlin Entertainment should be held to account for perpetuating an outmoded and dangerous stereotype, then so should we all. I should be held to account for deliberately donning a mask that hides my own fears about the extent of my mental illness.

I wanted to believe that if I wore my mask long enough, I wouldn’t be crazy.  It helped me lie to others. I lied on job applications, preferring to don the mask of depression rather than bipolar disorder (I perceived the former as a more acceptable face of mental ill health). I did this to myself! I self-stigmatised precisely for the same reasons that Thorpe Park equated ‘thrills, spills and terror’ with an asylum: the unpredictability of my illness left me in fear of myself. The fear that I am losing my self. This fear was not of knife-wielding killers running down the halls. My fear is of incarceration because once you’ve been hospitalized, the prospect of going back is unconscionable.

Being in hospital was giving over control of my life (or death) to strangers and being surrounded by the strange and frightening. It was cold and soulless. There was screaming: one woman screamed throughout the night. There was blood: a girl in her mid-20s arrived with freshly bleeding cuts on her arms from self-harm. There was fear: the woman who took up the bed opposite me whispered constantly to herself that we were out to kill her and that she would kill ‘them’. But there I was: depressed, unsafe, hell-bent on self-annihilation. The most terrifying thing was the sense that I had dropped out of time and become a caricature of something I thought I’d seen in a film. Crazy for me is unsafe, terrified, suicidal, unable to manage by life, self-loathing, being torn apart by a furious energy that won’t stop. I know I’m not Michael Myers. But this idea of a mask made some sense. For Myers, the mask was a metaphor: the empty face of the killer cannot be understood and it is more terrifying to wonder what is under the mask, asking us to question what makes one turn on others. We fear what we don’t understand. But all this fear and confusion that I may break apart and disrupt people’s lives in the process is NOT entertaining. This mask that society implies I wear for the benefit of others is the result of the confusion between health and heterogeneity. It is between distress and amusement. It is between accepting who I am and denying some fundamental truths about myself. The public entertainment industry has the power to tell us who is safe and who is dangerous: this polarization is destroying the lives of many people who pay the price for hiding behind a mask so that the finger of fear and distrust does not fall on them. Thorpe Park should be held accountable for wantonly stigmatizing vulnerable people, whose struggles are not for entertainment, forcing them to don a mask and hide from the world around them often to the detriment of their health.

“There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will.”  The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman