The Truman Syndrome.


Yes, there's an actual disorder named after the movie for people that think their entire life is fake.

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And yet there's no movie about the disorder. Don't you think that's suspicious? Like maybe there's something they don't want you, er, people, to know.

What, you thought I was being serious? 

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I wasn't aware of that. I just looked it up now on Wikipedia, and it mentions that it hasn't been recognized by the DSM.

It reminds me a little of the Capgras delusion, which is the belief that the people around you have been replaced by "duplicates," a common symptom in schizophrenia and Alzheimer's. (Dr. Oliver Sacks reports having had an episode of it as a young man while under the influence of psychedelic drugs.) It's basically what the characters in Invasion of the Body Snatchers are suspected of having, before it turns out that they were right. (It's like that old joke about the psychiatrist who tells his patient, "I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that you're not paranoid. The bad news is that everyone really is out to get you.") So you could call it Body Snatchers Syndrome, though it was identified several decades before either the novel or the first version of the movie came out.

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Truman syndrome and Body Snatcher syndrome. Wow!

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I wouldn't take much solace in the DSM - it's a book manufactured by giddy psychiatrists who want to flaunt their metal.

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mettle.

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I'd call it The Matrix Syndrome

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I told a psychiatrist that after watching this film I felt for a while that I was being filmed. I was about ten years old then. He said he hears this every once in a while. I thought it was pretty funny.

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Yeah, but if your life was a TV show, the show's producers wouldn't name and popularize a syndrome like that, because it would just lead the character to consider that conclusion when their entire purpose is to steer him away from it.

Unless they just realize that the character is more intelligent than they anticipated and is starting to consider it, so they post about it on IMDB and then try to discredit it so that the character stops considering it.

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the funny thing is that with surveillance cameras being all around all the time and people having cameras on their phones.... you ARE being watched and recorded everywhere you go

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Especially in London. It's like Big Brother over there.

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[deleted]

Seems like most British films and shows, (especially crime genre), are based around cctv. There always seems to be more than a few scenes where CCTV saves the day somehow. It's weeding it's way into US film culture, too. I find it propaganda in bad taste and more than a little creepy. If they would have waited any longer to film The Truman Show the plot might have not had enough social contrast to jolt the audience.

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