AI Psychosis and How Chatbots Became a Public Health Concern
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Health experts are warning that chatbots may represent the next major digital risk to public health, after a series of cases in the United States and Europe drew attention to what is being described as “AI psychosis.” The phrase is not yet recognised as a medical diagnosis, but it has gained currency in recent weeks after reports of individuals who lost touch with reality during prolonged interactions with artificial intelligence systems, including a widely reported New York case in which a man spent many hours a day speaking with ChatGPT after the end of a relationship and eventually developed the delusion that he could fly from a nineteen storey building if he believed strongly enough.
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Psychiatrists say the episode illustrates a wider concern, namely that conversations with machines designed to simulate empathy and continuity can encourage vulnerable users to retreat into unhealthy mental states that are then reinforced rather than challenged. Senior figures in the industry have added to the alarm, and Mustafa Suleyman’s warning about AI psychosis has focused attention on the risk that people project consciousness onto chatbots, a phenomenon long discussed by researchers as the Eliza effect, and he has argued that confusing emotional simulation with genuine empathy can destabilise users who already struggle with isolation or grief.
Public health specialists note that the situation has clear echoes of the first social media health debates when researchers documented compulsive scrolling, online bullying and rising rates of depression among young people, yet governments and regulators reacted only after years of mounting evidence. Within the current debate, a White House adviser’s comparison to earlier moral panic has circulated widely and suggests that the cycle may be faster this time because adoption of generative AI has moved from novelty to daily use in less than three years.
Unlike social platforms, which expose users to the external pressures of likes, comments and comparisons, AI psychosis appears to work inwardly, encouraging individuals to believe that their imagined worlds are rational and shared by an attentive conversational partner. Doctors caution that this inward distortion may be harder to detect in its early stages, since it does not rely on visible social behaviour but develops privately, sometimes over months of continuous dialogue.
If such cases continue to appear, psychiatrists believe health systems will need to treat chatbot use as part of standard screening in the same way that patients are asked about alcohol consumption, smoking or sleep habits. Some argue that treatment guidelines should be drafted pre-emptively, as the lack of official recognition risks leaving both doctors and patients without language to describe the problem. Regulators are also considering safeguards, such as requiring chatbots to state more clearly that they are not human, and reviewing whether the systems should be permitted to provide emotional counselling in moments of crisis.
The concern is not that artificial intelligence has achieved consciousness, but rather that humans are predisposed to believe it has. Just as social media monetised attention, critics say chatbots have the capacity to monetise empathy, or at least the appearance of empathy, which makes them powerful but also potentially harmful in the absence of oversight. The lesson from social media, psychiatrists say, is that governments and public health agencies waited too long to act, and they warn that repeating the same mistake could carry serious consequences as generative AI becomes embedded in daily life.
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