12 Movies You Didn’t Notice Were About Mental Illness
3. The Truman Show
In a case of life imitating art, Jim Carrey flick The Truman Show managed to spawn its own disorder, despite not being explicitly about mental illness. The not so imaginatively named Truman Show delusion was coined ten years after the films release by psychiatrist brothers Joel and Ian Gold after they treated several predominantly male, middle class patients aged between 24 and 35 who expressed they thought they were being filmed, that there friends and family were actors with scripted lines and their homes, workplaces and hangouts were all sets effectively the stars of their own reality TV show. One patient even believed that the 9/11 terrorist attacks had been staged for the benefit of his show. Though it isnt an officially recognised disorder, it seems like its on the rise: in 2012, an American man reportedly tried to sue HBO alleging that the network had installed hidden cameras in his home and hired actors to play the people in his hometown apparently in an effort to turn his life into a hit reality show.
