By DON KAPLAN
Posted: 6:40 pm
July 23, 2008
TWO Montreal shrinks have diagnosed a new mental illness where sufferers are convinced their life is one, big reality TV show.
They're calling the disorder the "Truman Show Delusion," after the 1998 movie starring Jim Carrey.
Psychologist brothers Joel and Ian Gold, who are writing a paper about the illness, have treated five men, all between the ages of 25-34, for the disorder.
"I realized that I was and am the center, the focus of attention by millions and millions of people," one patient told the doctors.
"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."
"The delusions we treat are narrow," Dr. Joel Gold told Canada's National Post newspaper. "There is Capgras Delusion, where someone will think his family has been replaced by doubles.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," he says.
"The Truman Show Delusion, though, involves the entire world.
