Dear Escape Game Leeds. Mental illness is not entertainment
The Leeds-based company created a game called “Asylum” but weren’t prepared for the backlash
Well, life is never dull in mental health world. Another day, another fresh PR disaster, this time for Escape Game Leeds, who launched their “Asylum” game and found themselves facing a huge backlash.
The game is set in an old psychiatric asylum, which the company says is fictional, but in Leeds it has hit far too close to home. The old High Royds Hospital, about 10 miles out of the city, is still fresh in the collective memory of the mental health community around here because of historic abuse allegations and having been used by Jimmy Savile as a place to find victims to abuse who would a) not complain and b) not be believed if they did. There are many people here who survived High Royds, and for them, the old asylum system is no joke and certainly not a form of gruesome entertainment for morbidly curious young adults. “People bound to a chair, locked in straight[sic] jackets, fitted with mouth traps” as it says on the company’s website — well for people who survived the horrors of the old mental health regime, that may well have been their reality. In whose world exactly does this classify as a fun leisure activity?
Survivors and professionals alike have also criticised the game for stigmatising mental health, stating that it risks painting mental health patients as “tormented and dangerous individuals”, as Claire Woodham, governor for Leeds and York Partnership Foundation Trust, said when speaking to the BBC earlier this week. As a mental health survivor myself, I found the game quite insulting and was quite shocked that someone would even come up with this idea, given the increasing awareness around mental health and stigma. More worrying still is that The Great Escape Game’s primary audience is young adults, so what kind of messages are we giving young people about mental health and people who suffer with it? That people with mental health issues are scary and unpredictable and that it’s fine to use their suffering as entertainment?
Apparently, this surprised the company and they really didn’t seem to see the problem. They refused to engage with people, including professionals, who contacted them on social media, giving only the instruction to email the marketing manager. To date, the company’s director, Hannah Duraid, who has won multiple awards for the Great Escape Game franchise, has not made any statements, instead choosing to leave the communications to more junior members of staff, fielding the marketing and business development managers instead, indicating that the company sees this as a marketing issue rather than one of fundamental values. The director’s silence on this speaks volumes about how much the company cares, and their apologies have thus far amounted to “we’re sorry if anyone was offended” rather than genuinely looking to understand and repair the harm done. Escape Game Leeds’s official statement seemed to be more worried about the distress caused to staff because of the Twitter comments than to people with mental health issues who have felt alienated, stigmatised, and targeted because of this insensitive, ill-considered ‘game’. Perhaps if the company had fielded a properly experienced staff member to deal with this issue rather than allowing junior staff to “turn negative tweets into a light-hearted conversation” as is the company’s social media policy, they wouldn’t have received such a strong response to their utter tone-deafness.
The good news is that at least they have agreed to attend a meeting today, hosted by Leeds City Council CEO Tom Riordan and attended by local charities and survivors. There are signs that the company is starting to comprehend the seriousness of this, with a company rep stating “I can see how stuff like this can create a negative stigma towards mental health”. They have said they will consult with mental health charities (although I wonder why they didn’t do this first) but they are at the moment still sticking by their decision not to cancel any bookings. The cynic in me says this is more about not wanting to lose money than actually genuinely wanting to engage with the issues.
My message to the company’s reps attending today is listen; don’t be defensive, understand that businesses do not exist in a vacuum and this has caused harm to vulnerable members of the community. The community might be angry right now, but if the response is genuine and heartfelt, forgiveness will follow — nobody wants to create a pariah out of this creative young entrepreneur’s business. This could be an opportunity to learn and grow and even for the company to demonstrate leadership through humility. Admit you got this wrong, pull the game, donate any profits made so far to mental health charities, and move forward. There are plenty of things to create games out of without co-opting the suffering of people with mental health problems for profit. This is no longer something the community will accept; make no mistake, we will make our voices heard, we are no longer afraid to speak out and advocate for ourselves and each other.
The old days of the ‘insane asylum’ are gone — let’s keep it that way.
I write about mental health on an open platform to help survivors and professionals
