"The Truman Show Delusion"
Joel Gold, a psychiatrist at the Bellevue Hospital Center, revealed that by 2008, he had met five patients with schizophrenia (and heard of another twelve) who believed their lives were reality television shows. Gold named the syndrome "The Truman Show Delusion" after the film and attributed the delusion to a world that had become hungry for publicity. The syndrome predominantly affects young white men.
Gold stated that some patients were rendered happy by their disease, while "others were tormented". One traveled to New York to check whether the World Trade Center had actually fallen — believing 9/11 to be an elaborate plot twist in his personal storyline. Another came to climb the Statue of Liberty, believing that he'd be reunited with his high-school girlfriend at the top and finally be released from the show.'"
In August 2008, the British Journal of Psychiatry reported similar cases in the United Kingdom. The delusion has informally been referred to as "Truman syndrome," according to an Associated Press story from 2008.
After hearing about the condition, writer of The Truman Show Andrew Niccol said: "You know you've made it when you have a disease named after you."
Read more about this topic: Truman Burbank
Famous quotes containing the words truman, show and/or delusion:
“Damn it! What a way to fly into a war—unarmed and out of gas!”
—Larry Forrester, U.S. screenwriter, Hideo Oguni, and Ryuzo Kikushima. Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda, Kinji Fukasaku. Major Truman Landon (Norman Alden)
“Heaven has its business and earth has its business: those are two separate things. Heaven, that’s the angels’ pasture; they are happy; they don’t have to fret about food and drink. And you can be sure that they have black angels to do the heavy work like laundering the clouds or sweeping the rain and cleaning the sun after a storm, while the white angels sing like nightingales all day long or blow in those little trumpets like they show in the pictures we see in church.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)
“Again and again, faith in a possible satisfaction of the human race breaks through at the very moments of most zealous discord because humankind will never be able to live and work without this consoling delusion of its ascent into morality, without this dream of final and ultimate accord.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)