More From Fab New Intern Becca Trabin: Update on Truman Show Delusion
The name of the delusion comes from two brother psychiatrists in Canada, Joel and Ian Gold. Joel Gold says of his newfound delusion—
It’s really a question of the extent of the delusion. The delusions we typically treat are narrow: There is Capgras Delusion, where someone will think his family has been replaced by doubles.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.
Liz is right that their findings are entirely too narrow– reporting on three of your five patients is much different from reporting on three fifths of your patients. However, speaking as a person who’s suffered from various delusions during my experiences with bipolar mania, I have to say that the Gold brothers aren’t too far off:
I’ve gone to my psychiatrist before and told him that I suspected I was living in a world similar to The Truman Show. I even had a lucid dream about it recently, in which I got to have lunch with Tony Shalhoub, but he kept insisting he was Adrian Monk. (Annoying!) So I became irritated and tried to leave his “set,” but it was surrounded by a body of water encased in a giant dome. Luckily, since it was a lucid dream, I went and got a jet pack and flew through to the other side.
Does that mean the Golds are correct that The Truman Show is making people delusional? No. It’s an issue of causality. People have probably had paranoia about the falsehood of the outer world since Plato wrote his Allegory. The Truman Show is just a sign of the times—we’re culturally saturated in artifice (see above photo), most of which is filmed. If anything, I’d call my delusion Baudrillard Syndrome– which is basically what the Wachowski brothers did in The Matrix– since Baudrillard’s done some justice to the idea that mass culture is seriously exacerbating all of my feelings of alienation.
liz | 4:49 PM | Uncategorized
Deadline Day: Becca Trabin Takes Over
Yay! TTWS has an intern, Becca. We love her. Here’s her first post:
The Associated Press recently reported that over 22,000 veterans have called a new VA suicide hotline within its first year of operation.
According to the VA’s own estimates, an average of 18 veterans commit suicide every day, a fifth of whom are under the care of the VA.
The young ones (age 20-24) returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are the most at-risk, being two to four times as likely as civilians to commit suicide. A CBS report asked whether or not the number of suicides each year warrants the use of the “E” word—
CBS News went to the Department of Veterans Affairs, where Dr. Ira Katz is head of mental health.
“There is no epidemic in suicide in the VA, but suicide is a major problem,” he said.
6,500 preventable deaths per year among a population that’s supposed to be receiving proper treatment for PTSD from the government, but isn’t, and that doesn’t qualify as an epidemic?
Then there’s at least an epidemic of spokespeople from one American bureaucracy after another who tell outright lies about the failings of their institutions. It takes a representative from a group with the phrase “common sense” in its name to interpret these figures rationally–
“Wow! Those are devastating,” said Paul Sullivan, a former VA analyst who is now an advocate for veterans rights from the group Veterans For Common Sense.
“Those numbers clearly show an epidemic of mental health problems,” he said.
Over 4,100 troops have died fighting in the Iraq War—if tens of thousands of troops make it home alive only to lose the will to live, the Department of Veterans Affairs at least owes them the decency of acknowledging the severity of the problem.
liz | 12:54 PM | Uncategorized
Ah. Another Hideously Misleading Statement From the Mainstream Media on the Subject of Mental Health
Check this out, my friends. It’s from The New York Times. The writer is Sarah Kershaw:
Psychosis in the 21st century looks something like this: You think your every move is being filmed for a reality television show starring you, and that everyone in your life is an actor.
Or you think you are under intense surveillance by an army of spies, whom you refer to as the “www people,” as in the World Wide Web, and they wiretap your furniture and appliances.
Or else you refuse to drink water because you fear that another cup drawn from your faucet will, once and for all, deplete the world’s water supply.
Those thoughts are from three case studies of what psychiatrists interested in the intersection of mental illness, culture and society are calling, respectively, Truman Show delusion, Internet delusion and climate change delusion; all of them a window, through madness, into the modern world.
Three studies. Hey, Sarah, are you ever psychotic? My guess is no. But I’ll bet you like a nice provocative lede. It’s like putting a photo of a babe in a bikini on your article. Why not just do that instead of making a blanket statement that’ll be considered credible by millions?
Look Closely, Doctor: See the Camera?
liz | 10:20 AM | Uncategorized
Tina Fey Apologizes for Looking Like Me
I linked to this once before, but I wasn’t able to embed it. Now I’m embedding it, mostly so that I can relive this joyous occurance, and so that I’ll always know just where to go to watch it. You can skip right over it if you like.
liz | 12:38 PM | Uncategorized
Eli Lilly Cracks Me Up
So first they come out with a drug that causes diabetes, then covered it up, and they’re in a hell of a lot of trouble because of it. And now, guess what? A drug that Lily makes to treat diabetes appears to cause death! That’s the ultimate bad side effect.
Oh, the irony.
Diabetes Drug Tied to New Deaths
liz | 11:05 AM | Uncategorized
My New Crush
My friend Laura thought my column about pregnancy was too hetero. This is probably because Laura is often more than “my friend Laura” and therefore has a larger stake in how I present myself to the world. I don’t agree with her, though. Just because someone at 40 frets about biology and baby-having doesn’t make them straight. I’ve always been open about my queerness. But having a rather flexible sexual orientation doesn’t negate the serious issues that arise when contemplating having your ovaries dry up.
Anyway.
My new girl crush is a wife and mother both. Granted, she’s (very conspicuously) married, but still. Even if you don’t watch all of this, just know that she specifically places an emphasis on mental healthcare. Not the issue overall, but the words, which in the world of political grandstanding, is good enough for me. Kisses, Michelle.
liz | 5:26 PM | Uncategorized
The Most Assholish Thing You Could Possibly Do Right Now
It is this: Out of spite and frustration and petty, intellectually dishonest inclinations, be a Democrat yet vote for a Bush-style candidate who endorses the Republican Party’s platform. Either you believe what you said you believed while Hillary Clinton was running, or you were full of shit the whole time. If you were full of shit the whole time, Sen. Clinton wasn’t worthy of your vote, and I feel sorry for her that she had supporters like you.
There is an enormous difference between parties. What happened to all the vitriol against the GOP, and the rhetoric of taking back our country? I guess now, because you’re sore losers, you like the Patriot Act and the way the Supreme Court has been shaping up. This is the legacy of my mother’s women’s movement? Dear god, I hope not. I wasn’t brought up this way.
Granted, there are very few of these people, but the media is making major hay out of them. From Rebecca Traister via Salon:
“This is where you see the civil war!” burbled Chris Matthews, experiencing near-asphyxiatory pleasure on an outdoor stage in the sweltering Denver heat, while behind him two competing groups, Obama supporters and the PUMA (Party Unity My Ass) backers of Hillary Clinton, chanted “Obama! Obama!” and “Hillary! Hillary!” at each other. Matthews looked as though he might wet himself as a camera panned the crowd, and he declared, “We’re at ground zero!”
Actually, he was about six blocks away from the Pepsi Center, the crowd behind him was probably no more than a hundred strong, and at least one of them was dressed as a toilet, (a gesture that seemed to have nothing to do with Clinton or Obama). But this is how media fantasy gets made, a miniature tableau of political discord, played out in front of a couple of well-placed television cameras and a television host who finds fetishistic, hyperbolic meaning in everything having to do with the defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her still-sore supporters.
… Next to them, a man in an Obama hat shouted, “You’re all irrelevant! Jesus!”
But irrelevant is not how the protesters will be portrayed by a media that has been salivating over the possible disruption of the Democratic convention — by angry, broom-riding succubi! — for weeks. Never mind that there were probably no more than 50 shouting PUMAs. Never mind that every national political convention in modern history becomes a locus for vocal agitators. Never mind that over the weekend, antiwar protests had been larger. Never mind that in three days in Denver I had not spotted a single PUMA or Hillary protester until I found where Chris Matthews was broadcasting. Never mind the guy in the toilet outfit. To hear Matthews, and the talking heads at CNN tell it, these demonstrators were “ground zero” in a rift that could potentially destroy the Democratic Party and ruin its national convention.
But at the same time, there are very real decisions being made right now as a result of the concern over Clinton’s sore losers, like whether to have the roll call publicly, as Traister goes on to discuss. It’s ridiculous because the majority of Clinton supporters are not fringy assholes like the PUMA folks. They’re reasonably proud of their candidate for getting this far and want to honor her. Now they might not be able to because the DNC is pussy-whipped by fear. And yes, I did use that term on purpose.
Ah. I feel better now. A good rant is always cleansing.
For more on these outer-limits people, click here.
liz | 2:34 PM | Uncategorized
Please Hire Our Heroes Even If They’re a Little Muddled
A new government website has been launched to educate the public about hiring veterans who have PTSD or Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). America’s Heroes at Work is a Dept. of Labor project that has two prominent links of its home page: “Learn How to Help Employees with TBI/PTSD Succeed,” and “Learn How to Hire a Veteran.” I like the FAQs page, and the fact sheet that tries to separate myth from fact regarding PTSD, including the notion that people with PTSD are always violent and that PTSD is a character weakness.
I don’t claim to have enough expertise to understand whether this website hits all the right marks or is sufficiently thorough. But I have to think it’s a good start.
liz | 10:23 AM | Uncategorized
Wow. That Was Fast.
I was just gearing up to write an angry column about this. Ah, well. I’ll have to get angry about something else.
liz | 8:23 PM | Uncategorized
Men Speak About Depression
A reader told me about some audio files of men (like firefighter Jimmy Brown, pictured) describing their experience with depression. They’re very short but powerful.
Go here to listen.
liz | 4:27 PM | Uncategorized
