Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes MadnessWhat if you woke up with the alarming suspicion that you were being watched? One day in 2003, a patient unlike any other that Dr. Joel Gold had seen before was admitted to his unit at Bellevue Hospital. This man claimed he was being filmed constantly and that his life was being broadcast around the world like The Truman Show—the 1998 film depicting a man who is unknowingly living out his life as the star of a popular soap opera. Over the next few years, Dr. Gold saw a number of patients suffering from what he and his brother, Dr. Ian Gold, began calling the “Truman Show delusion,” launching them on a quest to understand the nature of this particular phenomenon, of delusions more generally, and of madness itself. The current view of delusions is that they are the result of biology gone awry, of neurons in the brain misfiring. In contrast, the Golds argue that delusions are the result of the interaction between the brain and the social world. By exploring the major categories of delusion through fascinating case studies and marshaling the latest research in schizophrenia, the brothers reveal the role of culture and the social world in the development of psychosis—delusions in particular. Suspicious Minds presents a groundbreaking new vision of just how dramatically our surroundings can influence our brains. |
Contents
The Truman Show Delusion 1 | 1 |
PART I | 15 |
One Hundred Years of Delusion | 59 |
The Madding Crowd | 115 |
Hell Is Other People | 157 |
Belief Unhinged | 191 |
Beyond Belief | 219 |
Notes | 245 |
Bibliography | 271 |
Figure Sources | 303 |
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abuse African American amygdala antipsychotic asylum behavior believed Bellevue Benjamin Bertha biological bipolar disorder brain Calvin Capgras Capgras delusion Charley childhood chlorpromazine clinical colleagues culture delu delusional disorder delusional thoughts depression developed diagnosis disease dopamine drugs Edited effect emotion environment episode Erotomania Ethan evidence evolutionary faces feel Figure Freud function genetic grandiose hospital human hypothesis Ibid idea immigrants influencing machine James Tilly Matthews Jane Journal of Psychiatry Kevin Kirkbride living Lori Louis madness medication mental disorders mental illness mind Neuroscience Oxford paranoid patients percent persecutory delusions person phrenia psychoanalysis psychological psychosis psychotic disorder psychotic symptoms Reflective System schizo schizophre schizophrenia Schreber sexual Sigmund Freud sions social defeat social threat someone strange experience stress suffering Suspicion System theory of delusion therapy tion Todorov treatment Truman Show Truman Show delusion University Press urban vulnerability wife York