Mar 25
You’re not a star! The Truman Show delusion
It seems inconceivable, but due to the popularity of reality TV shows, there is now a syndrome called The Truman Show delusion, where sufferers believe they’re are actually the star of a TV show or film, and that the rest of the world is a film set and all the people are actors and actresses.
There have been over 40 reported cases, mostly in the US and UK, which probably tells us something about the effect the trash they put on our screens has on us? An upper-middle class Army veteran who wanted to climb the Statue of Liberty in the belief that doing so would release him from his “show”, described his condition:
I realized that I was and am the center, the focus of attention by millions and millions of people … 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.
Another sufferer – who had actually worked as an intern on a reality TV show – believed that he was secretly being filmed by cameras. At the polls on Election Day in 2004 he shouted at President Bush: “Judas”. This brought him to the attention of brothers Joel and Ian Gold, who are both psychiatrists. It was these two who coined the term The Truman Show delusion.
