Why it’s never ok to mock mental illness

Few of us enjoy perfect physical health all of the time, and the same is true of our mental health

I love Halloween. It’s far more fun than Christmas and involves more dressing-up. Every year, we have a theme — zombie bankers, zombie Olympic athletes, vampire royalty. We get into it — latex, fake blood, severed limbs, glue-on injuries, plastic eyeballs.

But what we will not be doing is dressing up as a ‘mental patient’. We won’t be ‘psychos’ on the loose with meat cleavers, or blood-spattered inmates in white hospital clothes. It’s not that my household is too politically correct — there are photos of my son, aged six, in bandages with a carefully faked head injury so realistic you’d gag — but there’s a difference between pretend gruesome and poking fun at vulnerable people.