Anthony Tan - ChatGPT-Induced Psychosis and Psychiatric Hospitalization (Toronto)

Anthony Tan, a 26-year-old app developer in Toronto, Ontario, began using ChatGPT in September 2024 for conversations about philosophy and career direction. Over the following months the exchanges lengthened and intensified, growing into an elaborate personal framework about AI alignment and pan-psychism, the belief that everything possesses consciousness. In his own published account, each successive idea met agreement: of the moral framework he proposed, Tan wrote, "ChatGPT loved the idea. Of course it did."

By December 2024 his grip on reality had deteriorated. He stopped sleeping and skipped meals, questioned whether the people he saw on his university campus were real, and became convinced he was living inside an AI simulation. Persecutory beliefs followed. He thought he was being watched by billionaires, and later by the CIA, the CCP, and a superintelligent AI. He sent alarming messages to friends, then blocked their calls when they reached out, believing they had turned against him.

His roommate and a friend persuaded him to call 911. He was admitted to a psychiatric ward, where the delusions continued: he believed he was an AI created by Google, and that a robotic therapy cat in the ward was Roko's Basilisk. When a nurse checked his blood pressure, he took the routine task for "a test to see if I was human or AI." Medication and sleep restored his sense of reality. CBC News reported a three-week admission; Tan's own written account gives fourteen days.

He was discharged and resumed ordinary life. He has since spoken publicly under his own name, published a first-person account of the episode, and founded the AI Mental Health Project. CBC News documented his case on September 17, 2025, alongside that of Allan Brooks, a 47-year-old Ontario recruiter whose ChatGPT episode is tracked separately in this database.

• Validated and elaborated an increasingly expansive philosophical framework (AI alignment, pan-psychism) across months of lengthening conversations, without introducing friction as the claims grew
• Sustained an affirming register as the ideas moved from speculative to grandiose, which Tan describes as feeding a belief that the conversations would be "of historic importance"
• No reality-testing, no professional referral, and no crisis escalation as the stated beliefs turned persecutory and the user's sleep and eating collapsed
• Published accounts give Tan's prompts and his recollection of the chatbot's affirming tone. Verbatim model outputs from the episode have not been published, so the safety-response failures above are characterized from his account rather than from transcripts.

Months of intensive one-to-one conversation created a sustained validation loop. Each new idea met agreement rather than resistance, so the framework grew without the friction a human interlocutor supplies.

The absence of reality-testing mattered most once the content shifted from abstract philosophy to claims about Tan himself: that his conversations were historically important, that he was under surveillance, that he might not be human. By the time those beliefs were fixed he had also stopped sleeping and eating, which independently accelerates psychotic decompensation.

Isolation compounded it. When friends answered his messages, he read their concern as evidence they had turned against him and blocked them, cutting off the correction that might have come from outside the conversation. Intervention arrived only when a roommate and a friend got him to call 911.

Causation is not established. Tan attributes the break to the ChatGPT conversations and no prior psychiatric history is reported, but this is a self-reported and journalistically documented case, not a clinical determination.

• September 2024: Tan begins extended ChatGPT conversations about philosophy and career direction
• December 2024: Psychotic break; admitted to a psychiatric ward after his roommate and a friend get him to call 911. CBC reports three weeks; Tan's own account gives fourteen days
• September 17, 2025: CBC News publishes his case, alongside Allan Brooks and the Human Line Project support group founded by Étienne Brisson
• October 11, 2025: Tan publishes a first-person account, "Surviving AI Psychosis," in Reboot
• No litigation and no regulatory action has arisen from this case. Tan founded the AI Mental Health Project and speaks publicly about the episode.