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For his short story "Signs and Symbols", Nabokov invented referential mania:

[...] the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy - because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. Some of the spies are detached observers, such are glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others again (running water, storms) are hysterical to the pointof insanity, have a distorted opinion of him and grotesquely misinterprethis actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings - but alas it is not! With distance the torents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up in terms of granite and groaning firs the ultimate truth of his being.

The New Yorker published the story in the late 40s -- though they misunderstood it as a parody of psychological fiction. (Yagoda, About Town. See below.)

Zembla, the website of the Nabokov Society, has an overenthusiastic anti-deconstructive essay about the story, in which the author, Alexander Dolinin, announces, "Those who refuse to look for a hidden closure beneath the deceptive openness of "Signs and Symbols" are more guilty of a 'referential mania' than their opponents because they, like the insane boy, believe that everything in the world created by Nabokov refers to them and they are free to project their own doubts, uncertainties, and fears upon it."

On the subject of invented diseases, a bunch of science ficition writers contributed to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, which looks just fantastic.