[Infowarrior] - Surveillance Society Sparks Psychosis

[Richard Forno]

Surveillance Society Sparks Psychosis
By Kim Zetter EmailAugust 29, 2008 | 12:46:27 PM

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/surveillance-so.html

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 . . .