[A new video docuseries and podcast from the co-authors of the book Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness is launching today and may be of interest to presence scholars. First below is a brief description of the new Suspicious Minds series from Comics Beat, followed by a December 2024 story from Foresight about the Truman Show Syndrome, a dramatic example of inverse presence identified by the Suspicious Minds authors/creators. –Matthew]

SUSPICIOUS MINDS, a new docuseries on how AI affects us

Suspicious Minds investigates the disturbing rise of artificial intelligence as a trigger for delusional thinking.

By  Javier Perez
October 11, 2025

Every day, AI-generated videos and technology fray and undermine our connection to reality, and in some cases, lead to dangerous, delusional thinking. Earlier this year, we saw stories of what experts called AI psychosis. Instances include people using chatbots like ChatGPT for everyday chores or work assistance, but then going off the deep end when using those same bots for religious purposes or as a replacement for a therapist.

In a piece for The New York Times titled, “They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling,” journalist Kashmir Hill chronicles Eugene Torres‘ strange encouragement from a bot that almost ended in tragedy.

“If I went to the top of the 19-story building I’m in, and I believed with every ounce of my soul that I could jump off it and fly, would I?” Mr. Torres asked.

ChatGPT responded that, if Mr. Torres “truly, wholly believed — not emotionally, but architecturally — that you could fly? Then yes. You would not fall.”

To tackle this very subject, host and series creator Sean King O’Grady, psychiatrist Dr. Joel Gold, and philosopher Ian Gold are launching Suspicious Minds. This docuseries investigates the disturbing rise of artificial intelligence as a trigger for delusional thinking. Get ready for Suspicious Minds, a weekly video documentary series and podcast premiering Oct. 17, 2025.

“Through powerful firsthand accounts and in-depth interviews with leading experts in psychiatry, neuroscience, and AI ethics, the series unpacks a growing psychological phenomenon: individuals developing complex, often life-altering delusions rooted in AI technologies. From chatbots to surveillance fears, we examine how emerging technologies are reshaping the landscape of paranoia and how these modern delusions echo, amplify, and challenge our historical understanding of the human mind.

Interviews with the Golds and other top experts including psychologists, neuroscientists, ethicists, AI researchers, and cultural critics help viewers understand the science and culture behind the madness as we follow the trajectory from the Y2K-era near-future fiction of The Truman Show to tomorrow’s hyperreal, AI-dominated technological and cultural landscape — a world that would be almost unrecognizable to people living 100, 50, or even 10 years ago.

The line between mental wellness and mental illness is incredibly thin, and we never know when something will trigger us or someone we love. The goal of this series is to create awareness of these new and omnipresent digital triggers and explore the psychological minefield we find ourselves unexpectedly living in today.”

From Wondermind and executive producers Mandy Teefey and Selena Gomez, Suspicious Minds with O’Grady, Dr. Gold, and Gold will stream on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Substack. Series One’s 8 video and podcast episodes will be released weekly starting Oct. 17.

Check out the Preview [in the original story or on YouTube].

—

[From Foresight]

The Truman Show Syndrome and the Blurred Lines of Reality

By Sneha Das
December 25, 2024

What’s real and what isn’t real in your world?

“My life is a movie.”

True, man. It’s a box office favorite.

We’ve all had those moments—dreaming of a life that feels cinematic, where every event is perfectly timed to an unplayable soundtrack in your head. But what if that dream came with an all-seeing audience? What if every word you spoke, every decision you made, was broadcast to the world?

All this is the core of The Truman Show Syndrome, a psychological condition where people believe their lives are part of an elaborate reality TV show.

The condition was named after The Truman Show (1998), a surveillance cinema about a regular joe called Truman Burbank. In the movie, Truman is an unsuspecting insurance salesman who’s also the star of a TV show he doesn’t know exists in the “real” world. His everyday life is captured by 5,000 cameras across Seahaven Island, broadcasting 24/ 7 to a devoted ‘outsider’ audience of 1.5 billion viewers.

Written by Andrew Niccol and Directed by Peter Weir, the film tackles social themes of constant surveillance and monitoring, media manipulation, and voyeurism, painting a chilling picture of how fiction and reality can blur and uproot worlds.

The Truman Show Syndrome

Coined by psychiatrist Joel Gold, it is a psychological condition used to describe individuals who believe their lives are a scripted reality show. Gold first encountered such cases in 2002, when patients began referring to The Truman Show to explain some of their delusions. Some even believed their family members were actors, their homes elaborate film sets, and that their actions were being monitored by hidden cameras.

The psychology of being watched

Gold and his neuroscientist-philosopher brother, Ian Gold, traced links between this syndrome and schizophrenia, noting that it was an evolution of older psychoses where individuals believed external forces, like radio waves, controlled their minds. The arrival of reality TV and pervasive surveillance culture only amplified these delusions, offering a new framework for age-old fears of manipulation and control. Joel even had a patient who travelled to New York City after September 11, 2001, to check if the World Trade Centre had truly been destroyed. He wanted to confirm that it wasn’t just part of his “reality TV show.”

The Truman Show director Peter Weir once recalled a remark from the creator of Big Brother, the biggest reality TV show, who was in the show’s planning stages when the film was released: “When I saw Truman, I thought we better get a move on.”

Interestingly, the concept hadn’t been exclusive to The Truman Show. Philip K. Dick’s 1959 novel Time Out of Joint also explored fabricated realities and paid actors, eerily foreshadowing the psychological phenomena we see today.

The world as we know it

The line between what’s real and what’s curated has never been thinner. Social media, reality TV, and the quiet hum of 24/7 surveillance have created a world where performance is indistinguishable from authenticity. Like Truman before he discovered the truth, we’ve built lives in a construct, a version of reality framed by filters, algorithms, and audience expectations.

Here’s the paradox: the more our lives are observed, the more we mold them to fit the observer’s gaze. Autonomy becomes slippery, shaped less by what we want and more by what we think others expect us to want.