The story was originally published in Futurism People Are Being Involuntarily Committed... on 6/28/2025 a followup on an article they had run on 6/10/2025, People Are Becoming Obsessed with ChatGPT and Spiraling into Severe Delusions. It is a publication of the World Future Society which has been focused for decades on making us into a better society able to handle our technological progress. Like, um, all those other civilisations there are in the universe They believe in measuring planets by the Kardashev Scale, made popular(?) by Carl Sagan. So yes, they are cranks, but intelligent ones, and mostly harmless. It is a fun rabbit hole. We have not even made it to being a Type I civilisation yet, measuring out at a Type 0.72 planet.
Other publications that jumped on this quickly include Mad in America, an alt-psychology publication that is very much on the anti-medication side of things and written by people who disagree with the diagnoses and/or treatments they have received in the past; Public Health Policy Journal, a general anti-vaxx site; Entangled States, a physicist who is now Episcopal Bishop of Rhode Island; Drudge has it; and then of course there is NIK from Part I.
Such sources are the yeast of society. They are only occasionally food in themselves, but we need them to make the actual food work right. They believe many things that are highly speculative on inflated evidence, but sometimes they are right. At least they are right enough that we should be following those lines of thought.
The supermarket tabloids are still out there, the National Enquirer, the National Examiner, the Star, the Sun, the Globe. These sources aren't those. But it pays to remember that these sorts of news outlets have existed for a long time whenever we get worried about how much worse this is today "with all that chatbot and AI and Lord knows what else those young people are doing today."
Another parallel before I look at this particular claim of ChatGPT causing psychosis. We said this about social media, though more about depression and anxiety than psychosis. Before that we worried about video games stealing the lives of children and otherwise healthy adults. Easily accessible porn, Dungeons and Dragons, TV, Hollywood, and comic books have been blamed for much. Romances have been ruining women for so long that we should probably just write all women off as unreliable at this point, right? All of these destructors have done evil on us, both as individuals and a society. None of them are as innocent as we pretend and they have sucked some life out of us. Yet none of them were as bad as feared, either.
Something like the five paragraphs above goes through my head whenever some new thing comes along that threatens to o'erthrow us. Human beings have persevered through many terrible things that have done damage to our personalities but have not caused us to become untethered from reality. Is this worse than being invaded, watching your family killed before you? Is this worse than an unexplained disease that kills 90% of the village? I had patients who had been kidnapped for a year as a child, grown up with psychotic parents, or suddenly gone blind or paralyzed and they were indeed mentally damaged by these. Yet not this. Not psychotic. Drugs or head injury might do it, directly attacking the brain, or some virus or combination of genes and prenatal effects, but not experiences.
Reading the above article it follows a familiar pattern. There is a frightening anecdote that would seem to have no other explanation but the theory that the reporter is putting forward. He was fine until this came along. He held a responsible job, she was a loving mother and talented artist, his twin didn't turn out like this at all. We are told that therapists and mental health professionals all over the country are suddenly seeing lots of cases like this - but no research numbers are included. Just lots and lots, though. People are concerned and some politicians have gotten involved and are working on legislation for this. And here's another anecdote. This could be you.
The article does raise the question of whether this is mentally ill people seeking out AI Chat functions, and predictably, finds an expert to say "It's probably some of both." But that is only true in a small way. ChatGPT might turn out to be bad for us, and any extra strain on an unstable mind might be the thing that pushes it over. There are likely people on the margin who would not have descended into psychosis but for some unfortunately-timed or unfortunately-constructed incident. There may also may be some of us who just escaped one of the few things that might have brought us down. Those with autism, or anxiety, or a fondness for weed might be more terribly susceptible than we anticipated. But usually not. The circumstances surrounding a person's schizophrenia seem of key importance to the family. When that girl broke up with him it just destroyed him and he was never the same. Not He was becoming psychotic, so she left him.
Part III will be But What if Something Just as Bad Were True? Science fiction and fantasy will be mentioned.
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