A midtown Toronto yoga instructor is calling for the TTC to remove a series of ads for a mystery game business encouraging participants to escape from a psychiatric ward.

Anne Thériault, 32, says she has filed a complaint with the TTC to remove posters promoting Mystery Room’s psychiatric ward escape game experience. The advertisements for the North York company are emblazoned with the message “Enter if you dare … Escape if you can!”

In the wake of actor Robin Williams’ struggle with depression and his recent suicide, Thériault, a former psychiatric ward and mental health hospital patient, said she was “grossed out” by the ads, which she first spotted on the Yonge-University-Spadina line.

“I feel like it is one thing for that type of (business) to exist, but it is another thing for public transit to post advertisements for it,” she told the Star. “We fund the TTC and that type of thing is super-stigmatizing to anyone with mental illness who is in treatment at a psychiatric hospital or is considering it.”

She believes the ads may deter those in need of treatment from seeking help and could undermine recent campaigns to de-stigmatize mental health services.

“It plays right into the old belief that people with mental illnesses are dangerous and violent, even though we’re far more likely to be the victims of violence than perpetrators of it,” she writes in an open letter posted online slamming the TTC for allowing the ads to be posted. “It also makes psychiatric hospitals look like frightening, terrible places, which is pretty discouraging to someone who needs treatment for mental health stuff.”

Escape rooms are popping up in the GTA for entertainment. Adventure seekers are challenged to find hidden clues and escape a room they’re trapped inside.

Joe Burton, Mystery Room’s owner, said Thériault’s complaint was “a complete shock.”

“We didn’t mean to offend anybody,” he said. “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.”

As part of an unrelated branding strategy, he said the company recently changed the name of the room to the “haunted hospital,” but the name change was not reflected on ads or spurred by complaints.

He has yet to hear from the TTC about the matter, but says he will apologize to Thériault and ask the TTC to change the posters.

Though Thériault says TTC staff told her their customer communications team will review the matter, spokesman Brad Ross says an issue must accrue five complaints before staff can send the concerns to an advertising review working group made up of three commissioners.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Once it receives five complaints, the group determines if the TTC was wrong to accept an ad because it violates laws, human rights codes or Canadian advertising standards.

Ross says the TTC has received four complaints so far.