An article in Yahoo News says that
Researchers have begun documenting what they dub the "Truman syndrome," a delusion afflicting people who are convinced that their lives are secretly playing out on a reality TV show. Scientists say the disorder underscores the influence pop culture can have on mental conditions.Is that the question, really? Duh? New? Grandiose delusions of fame?
"The question is really: Is this just a new twist on an old paranoid or grandiose delusion ... or is there sort of a perfect storm of the culture we're in, in which fame holds such high value?" said Dr. Joel Gold, a psychiatrist affiliated with New York's Bellevue Hospital. [...the article is short, easy to read...]
It's not new. It's just that sufferers now have a way to describe it, a context to put it in, something to compare it to when they report it. It's a feeling that everything around you is, like, scripted, not real. A feeling that you're being watched and tested, that much of what happens around you feels too well planned, designed to "get" you. A feeling that things can't be just random.
It's part of what was going on with me that landed me in the psychiatrist's office twice a week for more than four years in my middle thirties. That's why I recognize it so well.
I was pretty beaten down by the time I graduated from college, but I was coping. I had a job teaching in a small tourist town in Pennsylvania, and I might have been able to find my feet myself, but something happened in my first year of teaching that messed me up really badly (future post*, I think. Maybe).
It all just got worse and worse, until by the time Daughter was born, ten years later, I always felt like there were cameras watching me constantly. There were other problems, too, I had no sense of "me", but there were also the cameras.
Watching me.
Daughter and I would be alone in the house, and it was my house, and in 1975 the smallest video cameras were huge, so intellectually I knew there were no cameras - and yet I also knew they were there, watching me. Waiting for me to be a bad mother, to make a bad face or say a bad word, or get angry, or forget to feed her on time, or drop her, or ... whatever. Waiting for me to leave an opening so they could punish me. So they could make something outrageous happen to me.
I don't know why they (this article) used the word grandiose. I guess they're focusing on the "reality TV star" aspect? I've also heard "omnipotence" used. But anyone who would use those words doesn't understand that it's actually a feeling of NO control. Of being set up, and controlled, by others.
(I do know why "omnipotence" - because someone with this condition believes it's their failures that cause other things to happen - things that others see as completely unrelated. Those who call it omnipotence don't get the scripted aspect. It's not my power making it happen - it's the scriptwriters! The people who are watching me! That's the exact opposite of omnipotence.)
Silly researchers. Of course it's an old syndrome. It's just that people who have it can now describe it in new reality show terms. That's not enough to earn it a new name.
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* The description of that incident begins here.
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