......Mental Health and Political Correctness.....

One of my more popular posts was the Post I had about Paul Marsden, the Army Reservist, who committed suicide and my own struggles with PTSD. Mental Health Issues are important, but I am not a fan of political correctness, as I think we - as a society - go to far in our attempt to appease everyone.  We need to be able to laugh at and with ourselves.  We get to offended at too many things, for example; I came across this story out of Sandusky, Ohio about Mental Health advocates demanding name changes for Halloween rides at an amusement park. 

(Please keep in mind, I am an advocate for Mental Health issues - I served about eight years on the Board of Directors of the Newton County Mental Health Fund.)  These advocates, in Ohio, object to the words "crazy" and "demented" in the descriptions of rides!  Come on people, there is nothing wrong with entertainment and how far are we to allow Political Correctness to take us???  Here is the article from the Sandusky Register:

CP haunted asylum angers mental health advocates

Oct 07 2010

Sandusky

 

Mental health advocates aren’t crazy about two of Cedar Point’s Halloween attractions.

As part of HalloWeekends, the amusement park has a haunted house and separate show focusing on mental health patients: Dr. D. Mented’s Asylum for the Criminally Insane and The Edge of Madness: Still Crazy.

The attractions promote false stereotypes and misinformation, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The advocacy group is asking Cedar Point to remove the haunted house and the show immediately.

“Both of these displays suggest that people with mental illness are dangerous and deranged and that the general public should be frightened of such people,” the alliance wrote in a letter to Cedar Point administrators. “Mental illnesses are biological brain disorders, they are diseases.

“Would Cedar Point ever even consider developing a display or attraction that used cancer patients as a means of instilling fear in their guests? We think not. And why is this? Because cancer is a serious disease. We would never want to paint individuals with this terrible disease in an unfavorable light," the letter says in part. “Why then do you feel that it is acceptable to paint individuals suffering from biological brain disorders in an unfavorable light?”

A follow up article to this one, in the Sandusky Register, may be found by clicking this link.