What is main character syndrome?

We have all dreamed at some point that we are the protagonists or the main character of some movie or any fiction. There, we can imagine as heroes, or even victims of a tragic, romantic or funny story that we stage perfectly in our heads. Who hasn’t done it at some point, or many times?

The most dreamers of us go through life imagining the present as a node from which many possible routes begin, where we play characters that may look like us, but are not us. ANDThis always happens in our minds, a space where no one has access unless we expressly want to share it.

What is main character syndrome?

Nowadays, and given the incipient use of social networks in which we also use our mind and put it at the service of technology, that fiction could become reality without hardly realizing it, to the point of affecting both you and others. the people around you.

We are talking about a new syndrome on a psychological level, not a medical condition – at least not yet – but it seems that it has begun to be discussed by health experts for presenting a series of behaviors that consist of someone presents themselves as the absolute leader of their own life or that of another person, among other things.

A life that is presented and developed through social networks, and whose most immediate consequence is the irrepressible natural human desire to be recognized and validatedat all costs, even presenting himself as a person he is not in his real life.

Self-presentation or MCS?

The so-called Main Syndrome o MCS (for its acronym in English) talks about observe the same face over and over again in different settings. On Instagram, for example, it is very common to see how someone “promotes” their life as if it were a story in installments, where they tell about the places they have visited, or write about each place they go to, whether for dinner or breakfast.

But this is not something new, in fact today we consider it as something normal, but is it? At some point, many people do it, or have done it, we observe it in people known to the general public in different ways. So where is the problem?

On the one hand, self-presentation is a behavior that attempts to convey some information about oneself, or our image, to other people. It is a way of expressing our personality through the exhibition of our tastes and our way of living.; It is a kind of motivation in human behavior.

A study called Self-Presentation Theory: Self-Construction and Audience Pleasingand published by experts in social psychology, defines it as human motivations that are activated when we feel evaluated by other peoplebut also by the knowledge of others, which can be the motivation for one to behave this way.

“Networks are dreams and dreams are networks…”

When we adopt behaviors that are different from our usual repertoires or customs in order to highlight aspects of our own personality, to a certain extent it is valid and normal.

The problem of people with main character syndrome appears when they want or want to appear to be someone else completely to please, to appear, to demonstrate, to seek recognition or fame and, ultimately, to leave a mark through the networks by presenting an exaggerated cult of the self.

And the fact is that the many digital communication platforms that already exist make it easy for people to fall into the trap of the main character syndrome. The anonymity that networks offer allows many people to reinvent themselves and, in extreme and very dangerous cases, present false versions of themselves, which in the extreme can lead to psychological problems such as narcissistic personality disorder.

For psychologist and writer on the social effects of technology, Phil Reed, these types of fantasies can lead to behaviors that sometimes mimic those seen in personality disorders: “Fantasy behaviors maintained by escape can also be a serious problem for those vulnerable to the development of psychological problems, such as anxiety and depressionand not just personality disorders”.

For Phil, networks are a medium in which these types of psychological conditions can be aggravated, since the line that separates what is real from what is fictitious becomes increasingly blurred. “We have to be careful to distinguish main character syndrome from the reinvention of a ‘character’ by professional artists”.

Social media only makes it much easier and faster for anyone to present a false version of themselves, and there is a parallel in this sense with the fake newsnot a new phenomenon, but one fostered by social networks.

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