The Toronto Transit Commission has removed billboards for a popular escape game after The Toronto Star reported on four complaints about its mental health-themed ads. Modeled on similar games in Japan, “Mystery Room” invites groups of participants to gather clues and work together to try to escape from different rooms in a large building. “Enter if you dare — Escape if you can!” read the dark billboards for the game, listing four rooms called Satan’s Lair, Prison Break, Mummy’s Curse, and Psychiatric Ward. The Mystery Room’s website description for the Psychiatric Ward explained that, “Ward 15 is the place the mentally disturbed were contained. Dr. Johansson had a passion for experimenting on the unanesthetised living…”
“…The patients grew mad, losing the ability to speak as their throats ruptured from constant screaming,” continued the website description of the Psychiatric Ward. “These people now haunt the ward, seeking and exacting their revenge on unsuspecting victims. As you enter the ward, one thing is certain: it is going to take all of your knowledge and skill to get out alive.”
On her blog The Belle Jar, Anne Thériault quoted that text and wrote an open letter to the Toronto Transit Commission which complained that the ads reinforced a stereotype of psychiatric patients being violent. “It also makes psychiatric hospitals look like frightening, terrible places, which is pretty discouraging to someone who needs treatment for mental health stuff,” Thériault wrote. “Dealing with this shit is scary enough without advertising campaigns like this.”
Mystery Room’s owner told the Star, “We didn’t mean to offend anybody. We were just thinking of scary themes and someone suggested a psych ward would be scary, but we didn’t really think of someone who was in one who might be offended.”
The Star reported that Thériault was a former psychiatric hospital patient herself, but did not include the section from her open letter comparing the Mystery Room Psychiatric Ward description to the now-infamous CIA-funded MKUltra project at McGill University. “That is actually a thing that has happened. I seriously cannot stress that enough – that is actually a thing that has happened to psychiatric patients in this country,” wrote Thériault. “To make light of this type of violence inflicted against the mentally ill is beyond awful, and to turn it into a form of entertainment makes me pretty much choke up with rage. There are victims of these experiments who are still alive, and you’re advertising a game that makes a joke out of the horrific things they’ve experienced.”
The ads were removed and the name of the room was changed to “Haunted Hospital,” with the description, “This challenge will bring you to the brink of madness.”
Getting locked in is now a popular night out in Toronto, thanks to escape rooms (Toronto Star, July 26, 2014)
An Open Letter To The TTC – Please Remove These Posters (The Belle Jar, August 11, 2014)
Woman urges TTC to remove ads for psych ward escape game (Toronto Star, August 15, 2014)
TTC to remove psych ward escape game ads after complaints (Toronto Star, August 16, 2014)
Mystery Room — Haunted Hospital
Project Mkultra: One of the Most Shocking CIA Programs of All Time (Gizmodo, September 23, 2013)
