Reality bites Patients believe their lives are on TV: MDs
Craig Offman National Post
Joel and Ian Gold, brothers and psychiatrists from Montreal, believe they have discovered a signature mental illness of the YouTube era: patients who claim they are subjects of their own reality TV shows.
They have named the malady the "Truman Show Delusion," and though they are in the process of putting together a medical paper on the topic, their discovery is already causing a stir.
While traditionalists insist that this delusion offers nothing new -- it is no different from, say, a deranged man who believes that the CIA has planted a microchip in his tooth -- the Gold brothers argue otherwise.
"It's really a question of the extent of the delusion," said Joel Gold, 39, who has been on staff at New York's Bellevue Hospital Center for eight years. "The delusions we typically treat are narrow: There is Capgras Delusion, where someone will think his family has been replaced by doubles. Or the Fregoli Delusion, where someone believes that one person is persecuting him: a doctor, mailman, butcher. The Truman Show Delusion, though, involves the entire world."
He also says that The Truman Show had an impact on patients that other films did not, no matter how powerful they were. "I never heard people say, ' The Godfather, that's my life.' "
While Dr. Gold says they could have easily called their new disorder the EDtv Delusion or the Matrix Delusion -- both films that refer to an unreal existence-- three of the five patients he treated at the storied mental health hospital directly likened their plight to The Truman Show, the 1998 film about Truman Burbank, an affable suburbanite who slowly becomes aware that his every movement is broadcast 24/7 to voyeuristic viewers around the world.
The five patients Dr. Gold treated were white men between the ages of 25 and 34, the majority of whom held university degrees. "I realized that I was and am the centre, the focus of attention by millions and millions of people," explained one patient, an army veteran who came from an upper-middle-class upbringing.
"My family and everyone I knew were and are actors in a script, a charade whose entire purpose is to make me the focus of the world's attention."
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http://www.canada.com/topics/bodyandhealth/story.html?id=2724cd43-07d3-461a-9623-454d707bd42b&p=1