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The Truman Syndrome

Beats the heck out of thinking the CIA is monitoring your thoughts. Or George Bush is erasing your civil rights. The new paranoia is the delusion that your life is one big reality TV show. UK Telegraph: 

The self-exposure, instant fame culture peddled by reality shows, social networking internet sites such as Facebook and – above all – the home video-sharing website YouTube has provided a “perfect storm” for vulnerable people, encouraging them to put their fantasies on a global stage, say researchers.

Joel and Ian Gold, a New York psychiatrist and Montreal academic, say they have been inundated with cases since they first expounded what they have dubbed the “Truman Syndrome” two years ago.

The title refers to the 1998 film starring Jim Carey in which the main character gradually realises his humdrum life is being filmed as a reality television show and that everyone he knows is merely acting.

The condition might seem comical - one man went to a US government building and announced he wanted his show to end - but it tended to be “absolutely debilitating” as sufferers believed they could trust no-one, said Dr Joel Gold, head of psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in New York.

He said he had recently been contacted by the father of a girl who had contemplated suicide because she believed it was the only way of “getting out of the show”.

It was also difficult to treat because, as he had found himself, sufferers will dismiss their doctors and psychiatrists as actors.

Who doesn’t feel like they’re in the middle of some kind of reality TV nightmare? From what I’ve heard about London, everyone over there pretty much is, thanks to widespread public surveillance. It’s a two-fer for the paranoid, because the government is doing it, and doctors are all state actors. And we’re headed that way.

Anyway, it doesn’t sound like anything a good tinfoil helmet wouldn’t cure. Speaking of which, how come there isn’t a good tinfoil helmet reality TV show? Maybe a global warming one. It’s a competition over who’s more concerned about the planet, and doing the most to turn back the tide. The Greenest Loser. Guess who the host would be. The panel could include that NASA guy who makes up stuff. One of these Sustainable Absurdists could be good, too, because every reality show needs an English accent.

Topics: Greenness, TV, culture, medicine

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:52 pm on Tuesday, November 25, 2008

One Response to “The Truman Syndrome”

1. RebeccaH Says:
   November 25th, 2008 at 10:28 pm

   I don’t think this is a new thing. I think people who suffer this kind of paranoia have always been around, but the new technology adds a dimension to their paranoia that wasn’t present before. And the new technology makes them ever more visible, where they used to hide in Sister’s attic, and Mom’s basement.

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