Truman show

Remember the movie? Jim Carrey Tom Hanks is blissfully whisking around Seahaven Pleasantville, unaware that his every thought and move is being monitored, recorded, and produced as a television show?

I get some unusual mail. It normally comes handwritten, single spaced, in cursive, and is several pages long. As soon as my assistant opens the envelope, she knows it's one of those. These lengthy letters are usually a circuitous tale about some unintelligible form of mind control that the author has been subjected to by some individual or organization for no apparent reason. I suppose one or two letters of this type arrive each month. They are all different, but have some common themes of mysterious transmission of energy or implantation of devices in the author's head or home, the hearing of voices, surveillance through such household fixtures as the TV or toilet, having their mind read; bodily functions being inexplicably controlled remotely by others, and so forth.

One day I was in my office being interviewed by a Lincoln Journal Star reporter (who later became the Governor's spokesman), when I took a phone call from a woman who was suffering from this same type of delusion. The neighbors were beaming some kind of energy into her home. Her chief complaint was that this was causing her to have unanticipated bowel movements at inconvenient times. I asked her if she had told her personal physician about this issue (she had not), and gave her some encouragement to do so. I got his name, and offered to call for an appointment on her behalf. We chatted for about 5 minutes, and I could tell she felt better, and she promised to follow through with her doctor. I think the reporter was amazed and impressed

Last night, I received one via email. I pasted the text into a document, so I could do a word count. It is 10,682 words in 17 pages of single spaced text with nary a single paragraph break. The author is a 60 year old woman in Illinois. She has the usual symptoms: since a new neighbor moved into the townhouse next door a few years ago, he and his wife along with their criminal gang have somehow implanted both audio and visual monitoring devices in her skull:

"There is a gang in my neighborhood that consists of mostly males, and through some sort of (sophisticated) electronic, electro-field, ultrasound, satellite or some other method/application of surveillance has somehow tapped/set-up/hooked into me/my body and are intercranially stalking me 24/7365."

She has a rather unusual last name, and just out of curiosity I googled that. She shows up on a number of web forums. Apparently there are support groups for the intercranially stalked. Having heard the same basic delusion from diverse sources repeatedly during my entire career, I've always wondered how so many people have such similar delusions relating to plumbing fixtures, radio energy, dental work, and automobile mufflers.