On this week’s show, we will be talking to Professor Joel Gold of the NYU Langone Medical Centre about a mental illness know as ‘The Truman Show Delusion’.
After the 1998 movie starring Jim Carrey, the term was coined by brothers Ian and Joel Gold who are a phsychiatrist and a neuroscientist respectively.
The mental illness only affects a small amount of people and in a number of different ways but it can be extremely difficult to live with. Common symptoms include the feeling that friends and family are watching you solely for entertainment purposes and that you are living as the main focus point of a real-life movie. It has common ties to schizophrenia and bi-polar disease, as a constant paranoia grips the person and makes them feel like they are constantly being followed.
It sounds like a nightmare to most, but its links with a philosophical way of thinking have been evident for years with questions such as, ‘Do we as humans really exist or are we living in a matrix type world?’ Are you starting to feel paranoid yet?
