Surveillance Society Sparks Psychosis

Via Wired Blog (Threat Level) -

If you think someone is watching you, you're probably right. But this doesn't mean you're not also crazy, according to psychiatrists who say that our surveillance and reality TV society is spawning a new kind of psychosis. They're calling it the Truman Show delusion.

Psychiatrists in the U.S. and Britain say they're seeing a growing number of psychotic patients who are paranoid that cameras are watching their every move.

Not sure why they might think this.

Others fear the World Wide Web is monitoring their lives or being used to transmit photographs or personal information.

The psychiatrists say such patients are often mirroring -- albeit, to an extreme -- what is occurring in the environment around them.

One way of looking at the delusions and hallucinations of the mentally ill is that they represent extreme cases of what the general population, or the merely neurotic, are worried about. Schizophrenics and other paranoid patients can take common fears - like identity theft because of information transmitted on the Internet, or the loss of privacy because of the prevalence of security cameras to fight crime - and magnify them, psychiatrists say.

Which would seem to suggest that these patients might not be so delusional after all.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a delusion, considered still to be little understood in psychiatry, as, essentially, a false belief that is not grounded in reality and that is held with absolute conviction despite proof to the contrary. The manual lists a caveat that a belief is not delusional if it is something widely accepted by other members of a person's culture or subculture . .