The Truman Show Delusion: What Is It, and Is It Real?
In the 1998 film The Truman Show, Jim Carrey plays the role of Truman Burbank, a man who discovers that his life has been set up from birth on an enormous set– broadcast live to a world-wide TV audience, complete with advertisements and endorsements.
He begins to suspect that he is in a constructed reality and becomes paranoid of everyone around him, thinking that everyone but him is “in” on the gag.
Dr. Joel Gold, a psychiatrist in New York, claims that he has discovered a new type of psychosis, which he has coined “Truman Syndrome“, or the “Truman Show Delusion” (TSD).
(Psychosis is a mixture of delusions: fallacious, false beliefs, arriving without any evidence or logic; also hallucinations, usually voices)
This syndrome includes the delusional belief that the individual’s life is being set up and staged, or filmed for everyone else in the world.
He cites examples from some of his TSD patients, one claiming that when people made a thumbs-up sign, they were giving him a secret hand signal that they were ‘in’ on the show.
“I treated the first patients who gave rise to the description of the delusion and to the name TSD about a decade ago, though some of the patients had been experiencing symptoms for years, at least one since they saw the film” – Dr. Gold
However, when I stumbled upon this topic, I began to question the validity of this newfound “delusion”.
It’s important to note that outside of North America, this delusion is rarely seen or “diagnosed”; even the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) does not recognize or classify TSD as an official “disorder”.
My opinion? This is not really a “disorder”, but a variance on preexisting symptoms that doctors knew about (such as delusions, paranoia, hallucinations, etc.).
About 1.1 percent of the adult population has schizophrenia, one of the more common diagnoses given to the TSD patients that Dr. Gold has documented.
Additionally, this delusion has overlap with other symptoms in various disorders (primarily paranoid schizophrenia).
There is much debate as to whether this is a culturally manifested disorder, but I hold a strong conviction that Dr. Gold was not observing a new psychosis, but a delusion and/or hallucination merely in a different setting.
Many examples of this exist, such as turabosis (the delusion that one is covered in a copious amount of sand) that has been documented solely in Saudi Arabia (and would be unlikely to occur in North Dakota).
Or another delusion documented in rural parts of India, where individuals would be bitten by dogs and believe that they had become impregnated with puppies.
Of the 5 psychiatric cases of TSD that Dr. Gold writes about in his research, he mentions that that three of the patients directly referenced the Truman Show film. This could have also influenced the doctor to categorize these delusions separately, believing them to be distinct.
As Vaughan Bell, a clinical/research psychologist says, “If you pick up a psychiatry textbook, they will say your patient thinks they’re Jesus, or the old ones would say Napoleon… [t]hey are just variations on a theme, and the themes are usually profound paranoid beliefs about being under surveillance, and at some level being special … a variation of a grandiose delusion. In the middle ages, someone might have thought they were a saint. It’s the same story, just a different setting.”
Point is, there are various names for identical/similar things.
Not all variant symptoms of disorders can be classified as separate disorders themselves, so read the fine print on these studies!
(P.S.: Only 5 patients have been “diagnosed” with TSD.)
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/books-and-culture/caught-trap-culture-make-us-crazy-85191/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/04/truman-show-syndrome-disorder-counterfeit_n_1568159.html
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-ouch-24992984
http://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2012/jun/03/not-reality-truman-show-disorder
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/fashion/28truman.html?_r=0
http://nypost.com/2014/07/19/the-truman-show-delusion-and-how-our-culture-determines-crazy/
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