Sacred Disorder | Cliff Bostock's blog – 'Finally, I came to regard as sacred the disorder of my mind' (Rimbaud)
You are about to be voted out of your own life
One of the frequent criticisms of psychology and psychiatry is their penchant for dreaming up new disorders or over-diagnosing existing ones. They are assisted in this by Big Pharma which is always trying to find new uses for existing drugs.
Probably the most familiar example of this is the gross over-diagnosing of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder among kids. Boredom and acting out get pathologized as an illness, so parenting and the educational system don’t need to be examined.
Sometimes, of course, shifts in the culture do create ostensibly new disorders. The question is always whether the underlying problem is new or it’s an old problem with a new face, inflected by developments in the culture.
The latest is — sit down — “Truman Show Delusion,” whose sufferers believe they are subjects of their own reality TV show. Two Montreal psychiatrists are writing a paper about their discovery now but have already stirred up a debate.
The name of the disorder is borrowed from the film, The Truman Show, in which a man slowly comes to the awareness that his every moment is being filmed.
Read the entire story in Canada’s National Post here.