Groundomania

Groundomania, also called grounding fetish, grounding addiction, grounding hysteria or Boris Syndrome, is a fictional mental disorder in which the main symptom is the unhealthy obsession of "grounding" people, especially minors, such as one's own children, often by torturing them and giving them irrealistic grounding sentences if they fail to conform to irrationally rigid expectations of proper behavior, criminality and parentally or authoritarian abusive behavior in general. The abusive parenting caused by groundomania is technically grounding abuse.

The most famous case of this disorder is Boris Anderson, the father of GoAnimate Caillou and Rosie. His case is so severe that it is untreatable and made him extremely infamous, and he even has an alter-ego that includes an evil groundomaniac ten times more rabid as well (BTTG).

Symptoms may include:

• Grounding people for things beyond one's control (for stupid reasons)
• Giving unrealistic grounding sentences (such as "48745396874356 years") and very disproportionate punishments
• Physical abuse (torture, sexual assault, beatings or simply assaults)
• Yelling at people
• Extreme anger or bursts of rage, such as going ballistic for no apparent reason
• Grounding non-sentient things, fictional characters, or even own self
• Irrational hatred of minors (especially children)
• Unrealistic expectations of proper behavior
• Grounding authority figures or other people who cannot be grounded by the sufferer, such as strangers, a police officer, a boss, a friend or a spouse
• Grounding animals
• Grounding random people on the streets
• An inflated sense of superiority and authority
• Having the reflex of grounding whenever the sufferer feels wronged
• Giving groundings no matter what the situation is, even if the grounding victim has committed a horrible crime
• Generalized misanthropy due to the persistent belief that everyone must be grounded or that the world is against the sufferer

Their behavior can either be caused by a fetish, a traumatic event, hatred towards a "bad child", unresolved anger issues, delusions, hearing voices that encourage grounding, or socio-cultural pressure (mind corruption). It is an extremely common mental problem within GoAnimate citizens, mostly with the adult population. It is unsure whether there is an actual amendment in the GoAnimate/Vyond laws that stated that no person 18 or above is able to get grounded, nor if any law mentions the grounding hysteria.

Oddly enough, there can be an opposite of this disorder, called ungroundomania. Some people may have a mix of both addictions.

Variants of this include expulsomania, which is the obsession of expelling students; detentiomania, the obsession of giving detentions; and castigomania, the obsession of giving any kind of punishment. Not only parents can be affected by groundomania; any kind of adult authrotiy figure can be affected, such as a teacher, a boss, a babysitter or a warden. But, groundomania affects fathers more often than any other group.

When the grounding victims behave well, the groundomaniac may go through a period of grounding withdrawal, which can cause unprovoked attempts at grounding or punishing with no context.

The GoAnimate/Vyond practice of obsessively grounding and punishing people is called the "grounding culture".