PARANOIA

Despite its name, the PARANOIA roleplaying game doesn't derive much literal inspiration from the mental illness of paranoid personality disorder. Real-world paranoids are sad, humorless unfortunates, not at all the ideal model for players playing Alpha Complex Troubleshooters. But in the last few years this age-old mental labyrinth has opened what may be an interesting new subdivision.

In 2006, two brother psychiatrists, Joel Gold of New York's Bellevue Hospital and Ian Gold at Montreal's McGill University, proposed a new derangement they called "Truman Show Delusion": "patients who claim they are subjects of their own reality TV shows." Only a couple of years late, Canada's National Post is hot on the story:

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 "The delusions we typically treat are narrow: There is Capgras Delusion, where someone will think his family has been replaced by doubles.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. [...T]hree 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 center, 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."

But there are those who say this media tie-in psychosis is mere fashion-following:

Austrian Thomas Stompe, a leading psychiatrist with a traditional bent, believes there are seven kinds of delusions, period.

"A number of recent case reports published during the last 20 years described a quick inclusion of new technologies and cultural innovations into schizophrenic delusions, which led many of the authors to the conclusion that the 'Zeitgeist' is creating new delusional contents," warns Dr. Stompe, the lead author of a paper entitled "Old Wine in New Bottles? Stability and Plasticity of the Contents of Schizophrenic Delusions."

Published five years ago in the journal Psychopathology, the abstract concludes that there are only a few eternal themes of "extraordinary anthropological importance": persecution, grandiosity, guilt, religion, hypochondria, jealousy and love.

Those other Zeitgeist developments, presumably the Truman Show Delusion among them, belong in subcategories according to this categorization. [...] "The major topics are always the same."

(Via TechDirt.)