When you talk about a country you never visited, consider Paris syndrome | Hacker News Reader

When you talk about a country you never visited, consider Paris syndrome

en.wikipedia.org

7 pointstheseadroid5 comments

I call BS. When you're talking about a little more than a dozen diagnoses a year out of millions of tourists, a charitable interpretation comporting to this so-called syndrome is simply the statistical extreme of culture shock. But much more likely would be individuals with pre-existing, perhaps even undiagnosed sensitivity to various forms of mental illness thay happen to be triggered during their trip.

Perhaps in some it's even triggered because of the trip, as disruptions from normal routines and environs can be such a trigger, but a dozen or two out of millions doesn't rise above the (much higher) baseline of mental healh issues present in the population.

(Given about 33 million tourists per year and the approximate rate of 1:1600 baseline of psychosis in the population, more than 20,000 tourists might be expected to suffer from such a condition. That a handful have an episode on vacation is not evidence of some special syndrome)

I don't have any studies to link but at some point I read up on this and reached the same conclusion. The "discoverer" wrote a popular book about it that apparently caught the public imagination, but IIRC it was based on a small handful of cases, and if you try to find stats the number of people involved doesn't seem to differ much from what you'd expect for tourists having miscellaneous sorts of nervous episodes (or whatever the term would be).

The reason I posted this is to remind us what we have read from media could be far from the truth.

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/paris-syndrome-culture-shock-sic...

This approximate article in this approximate form is recycled every few years with no real evidence to back it up as an independant mental illness. I don't dispute that pop culture misrepresent any number of real life places and experiences. But roughly 1 in 1600 people will experience a psychotic episode in any given year. That a small handful get diagnosed, perhaps for the first time, during vacation isn't any cause for alarm or special diagnosis. It's even less surprising that the prevalence of this comes from countries where mental health issues are under diagnosed and overly stigmatized-- when the person coincidentally has an episode during vacation in a place with more progressive views of mental health they finally get recognized.

one of these days they will make boredom a disease, too

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