I would not have believed it.

If I were playing Balderdash, or something similarI have this very vague memory of an old game show called Liar’s Club–I must have seen repeats of it or something, since it only ran until I was 5 or 6 years old. The premise of the show was that people would make up a set of incredibly unlikely explanations for something, and the contestant would have to try to guess which of the explanations was the true (but equally unbelievable) one. For some reason this post is making me think of that show. and the term in question was “Paris syndrome” I am reasonably certain I would not guess the actual definition as the one most likely to be true–almost without regard to what the other choices might have been.

Let me get this straight: for a small, but statistically significant proportion of Japanese tourists, the experience of visiting Paris gives them what is essentially a nervous breakdown?

Here’s a quote from a BBC story on the phenomenon:

A dozen or so Japanese tourists a year have to be repatriated from the French capital, after falling prey to what’s become known as “Paris syndrome”.

That is what some polite Japanese tourists suffer when they discover that Parisians can be rude or the city does not meet their expectations.

The experience can apparently be too stressful for some and they suffer a psychiatric breakdown.

I especially love that the Japanese consulate in Paris has a special “bat-phone” for this issue. I also love the possible rationales listed in the Wikipedia article: apparently a significant factor is that the tourist experience of Paris doesn’t match the movies. Heh.

Yeah, if there weren’t a bunch of other relatively respectable publications on this, I probably would have doubted the Wikipedia entry as well.

This was all started by reading a list of ten bizarre disorders, btw.