“Paris syndrome” shocks Japanese tourists


The French may be Chic but they sure don’t find favors with the Japanese Tourists. In a bizarre revelation, about a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the harsh reality of unfriendly locals and horrid streets go against their expectations, a newspaper reported. “A third of patients get better immediately, a third suffer relapses and the rest have psychoses,” Yousef Mahmoudia, a psychologist at the Hotel-Dieu hospital, next to Notre Dame cathedral, told the newspaper Journal du Dimanche. This year Japan’s embassy in Paris has had to repatriate at least four visitors – including two women who believed their hotel room was being bugged and there was a plot against them. Japanese embassy official Yoshikatsu Aoyagi as saying.”Fragile travelers can lose their bearings. When the idea they have of the country meets the reality of what they discover it can provoke a crisis,” To cite another example, a man convinced he was the French ‘Sun King’, Louis XIV, and a woman who believed she was being attacked with microwaves.

The phenomenon, termed as “Paris Syndrome”, was first detailed in the psychiatric journal Nervure in 2004.

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