According to a CNN report today, people who have watched the movie Avatar are experiencing depression and suicidal thoughts.

On the fan forum site “Avatar Forums,” a topic thread entitled “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible,” has received more than 1,000 posts from people experiencing depression and fans trying to help them cope. The topic became so popular last month that forum administrator Philippe Baghdassarian had to create a second thread so people could continue to post their confused feelings about the movie.

“I wasn’t depressed myself. In fact the movie made me happy ,” Baghdassarian said. “But I can understand why it made people depressed. The movie was so beautiful and it showed something we don’t have here on Earth. I think people saw we could be living in a completely different world and that caused them to be depressed.”

A post by a user called Elequin expresses an almost obsessive relationship with the film.

“That’s all I have been doing as of late, searching the Internet for more info about ‘Avatar.’ I guess that helps. It’s so hard I can’t force myself to think that it’s just a movie, and to get over it, that living like the Na’vi will never happen. I think I need a rebound movie,” Elequin posted.

A user named Mike wrote on the fan Web site “Naviblue” that he contemplated suicide after seeing the movie.

“Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar’ I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it,” Mike posted. “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.’ ”

Other fans have expressed feelings of disgust with the human race and disengagement with reality.

I’ve experienced this kind of depression before (though not with “Avatar”), most notably after seeing “Les Miserables” for the first time and wanting to run away with the touring company. Come to think of it, some women in grad school quit four weeks into their first semester to become “RENT” groupies after seeing the show for every performance of its DC run. I think that was actually my fault.

Call it what you will – Post-Holiday Letdown, The Back-to-Reality Blues, The After-Event Crash – but I’m going to call it Marauders’ Guilt. I’m also going to suggest that people stop worrying about what disgusting things movie people are doing to a fictional planet and wake up to how we’re destroying our own. That, if anything, was James Cameron’s message. Be angry (and active) here; not in make-believe.

QUASIMORON – male, indeterminate age – Quasimoron is simple evil. It isn’t so much alive as it just exists. It is fat, hunched and cross-eyed; it dresses like a perverted clown. Its power is to make you exactly like it is – empty and dumb.