UNTREATABLE.COM
Patient makes eye contact with a stranger on the subway and then, instead of looking away, continues. For eight full seconds. A small smile appears around second five. The stranger exits at the next station, which was not their station. Patient moves to the now-empty seat.
Chronic. Worsens on public transit and in elevators.
Untreatable. Looking away feels, to the patient, like losing.
Patients with Advanced Staring Paralysis typically present with some or all of the following:
Advanced Staring Paralysis belongs to the Institute's growing taxonomy of behaviors that real medicine has declined to name. It exists, roughly, at the intersection of internet culture, interpersonal friction, and whatever is happening in the lives of our patients. It is fictional and it is everywhere.
Under its Latin label Contemplatio extendens awkwarda, the condition appears only in the Institute's own catalog. Real clinicians do not recognize the term. They recognize the behavior.
Think you have it? Find out what else you might be suffering from at the diagnosis generator. Or browse the full index of afflictions.