Psychosis and the City

I was thinking about how some cities have their own correpsonding psychological disorder. Like the Stockholm Syndrome, for example. Although as I understand it, this doesn't literally have much of anything to do with Stockholm itself or the Swedish urban experience. Which is probably for sale at Ikea, but you have to assemble it yourself with no real tools except a little metal turn-y thing.

Not to be outdone by Stockholm, Paris is also part of the proud and the few with their Own Unique Syndrome. And unlike Stockholm, this is really about the experience of Paris itself. The Paris Syndrome is a documented psychological disorder mainly found to affect Japanese people who come to Paris. It's more or less a nervous depression brought on by how little the real Paris lives up to romanticised Japanese notions of Paris, and probably exacerbated, I think, by larger cultural differences between the east and the west. In the 80s, a psychologist studied patients, treated them and most of them returned to Japan. If you don't believe me, you can google, wikipedia or whatever-other-website-names-have-now-become-English-verbs Paris Syndrome... It's even in that big red book of all the psychological disorders known to man.

Paris can sometimes seem to do its best to cause nervous depression, I know lots of people who probably suffer from this psychological disorder. The lack of sunlight all winter is fairly brutal and the skies, buildings, streets and people all start to take on the same shade of Hausemannian grey stone from the mid-19th century. But I think in a strange way, we do have a community and I'm grateful for the form that this takes. I am part of an international community for the first time in my life and I appreciate what a cosmopolitan a place I live in.

Within this cosmopolitan world, most people I know are looking for better jobs and better apartments. There's an element of being on a constant quest here that is by turns inspiring since we're all looking for something and striving towards this elusive goal and that's the human condition, really, but also by turns depressing in that it means that Paris has a high concentration of currently dissatisfied people.

Organised cultural events also help. Community building events in Paris are the annual fêtes when you can tour national monuments for free, the nights when the museums stay open for free and a day when musicians perform on the street all night for free. While most people appreciate these events and participate in them, we also simultaneously hate being in crowds in public...

In the film Crash, one of the characters said something about how we're all just reaching out to try to touch each other and interpreted car accidents as an attempt to find human contact. While car accidents are obviously caused by poor driving and not urban alienation, I do think that being part of a crowd in a city is simultaneously a lonely and violent experience. Just ride the metro during rush hour sometime.

Although everyone is very much in their own world of suffering in the metro during rush hour each morning, for example, I think a recent blogging trend shows how much people want to try to feel connected to those who share their urban experience. Blogs like L'inconnu dans le metro and others give short profiles of everyday people on the metro, or foreigners visiting Paris, or people who work in specific industries in Paris. My new blog also fits into this urban community outreach catagory, too. (It's a collection of profiles of different language teachers in Paris as a way to share and compare teaching experiences). We're curious about each other. We'd like to get to know each other. But maybe just not too up close and personal, despite-- or because of-- how we're always crowded into the same small public spaces. We'll still keep our digital distance over the internet. Where we can comfortably analyse our relationship with crowds and public urban spaces without being IN them and diagnose our own brand of the Paris Syndrome...