10 Lies About Famous Movies You Probably Believe

4. The Truman Show

The Lie: "There's an official psychological condition named after The Truman Show. Being good certainly helps, but there's lots of different ways a movie can have an impact on the real world. Few, however, get their own mental disorder named after them. The Truman Show is about a guy whose entire life is in fact a TV show; his home town is contained in a massive dome, his friends and family are actors and the town's obsession with branded items is product placement. Everything that happens is overseen by a control booth in the sky and it's all built so he'll never find out the truth. If that gets you questioning your own reality then you'll not be surprised to hear there's an official name for that - The Truman Show delusion."

The Truth: It's a colloquialism. The word "official" may be a bit misleading. 'The Truman Show' delusion is simply the name attributed to an existing condition; it doesn't actually appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It's the equivalent of calling filicide 'the Star Wars Condition'.

The notion of a person's life being part of a fabricated reality is an old one, and the TV show specific sub-group formed part of a Twilight Zone episode, as well as sharing many elements in sci-fi writer Phillip K. Dick's Time Out Of Joint - people believing it is just an extension of the typical delusions of grandeur.