Rampant Reality Show Trend Fuels Truman Paranoia

Medical historian Roy Porter once wrote that "every age gets the lunatics it deserves", and this rings true of the madness atop the reality TV show bandwagon of today, which is said to be nurturing a form of persecutory delusion called The Truman Show Delusion (TSD).

A self-explanatory name to those familiar with Jim Carrey's 1998 movie, 'The Truman Show', these viewers would likely be correct in their assumptions as to the nature of this delusion.

In the movie, Jim Carrey plays an orphan called Truman Burbank, who is the unsuspecting star of a reality TV show that's broadcast live in the homes of viewers across the world, 24 hours a day. Truman's entire life plays off in a massive archaeological dome in Hollywood that's made to look like a Florida seaside town but secretly equipped with thousands of cameras that film every second of his life.

And without committing the cardinal sin of dropping a massive spoiler, it's pretty much this exact plotline that those suffering from TSD fear they have fallen prey to.

The term was coined in 2008, by brothers Joel and Ian Gold, a psychiatrist and a neurophilosopher, respectively. Between 1998 (the movie's release year) and 2006, the Golds saw five patients with TSD, and the number of reported cases have been increasing ever since; something that the brothers attribute, in part, to the increasing popularity of YouTube and reality TV.

One of the patients suffering from TSD was Nicholas Marzano, who went as far as suing HBO for "filming and broadcasting a hidden camera reality show depicting the day-to-day activities of the plaintiff".

Another patient, who was employed as a newspaper reporter, believed that his colleagues in the media were concocting fake news stories and calculatedly feeding him these lies. He was eventually hospitalised for his delusion, and out of fear that he might commit suicide, but this only served to fuel his imagined beliefs. He thought everyone in the hospital was an actor and part of a set-up that would eventually see him receive a coveted prize for journalism. In true Truman-esque fashion, he also even tried to escape from the hospital because he wanted to compare the real news with the "fake" news he believed he was being fed.

Then there is also the case of a man who developed his curious delusion while actually literally working on a reality show. According to this patient, he came to believe that he was part of a reality show that secretly filmed the lives of contestants, and which would end with this bomb being dropped on its unsuspecting cast members. He not only believed that his family was paying for him to be on the show, but also that the film crew controlled his thoughts.

There are many who believe that the culture of a time shapes the delusions of its society, and there are quite a few obvious similarities between societal behaviour and big cultural events throughout history that seem to support this theory.

Before the late 19th century, delusions of being controlled or persecuted usually centred on witchcraft and the supernatural. These days, delusions are mostly about being controlled or persecuted by advanced forms of technology. while the 1940s saw the same fears, but involving radio waves.

The pop culture of the 21st century is saturated with stories (as well as a few unnerving facts!) of technology being used to observe us and even control our thoughts, and there are some who believe that the media-saturated culture of the zeitgeist is warping our sense of reality and increasingly blurring the line between fact and fiction.

Is our modern-day obsession with quick and easy fame creating the belief that celebrity is the only measure of a successful life? Are we buckling under the pressure of trying to live up to the perfect lives TV and social media appears to suggest everyone else is living but us? And does the not-so-happy-marriage between paranoia over Big Brother's ever-watching eye and the pressure to be unnaturally perfect affect us more than we know?

"For an illness that is often characterised as a break with reality, psychosis keeps remarkably up to date," the Gold brothers observed in a clinical psychiatry paper.

When you think about it, isn't a desert nomad more likely to believe that she is being buried alive in sand by a genie and an urban American that he has been implanted with a microchip monitored by the CIA? The idea that our thought can be controlled by technology still remains mainly in the realm of science fiction, but isn't it possible that it might be shaping our behaviour more than we think?

And this begs the question – shouldn't we rather be learning about ourselves and our times by examining the content of our madness instead of steadily embracing it from our fly-on-the-wall spot in Kim and Kanye's pretend-perfect mansion?