Event date unknownChinaUnidentified chatbot
A case series published in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care in 2026 by an author from the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev describes three cases in which chatbots misled patients or families. In the first, a 16-year-old boy with recurring abdominal pain had a severe episode while travelling in China and consulted a local alternative-medicine practitioner, who prescribed an herbal remedy containing Aristolochia (birthwort) extract. Unsure about the treatment, he asked a popular commercial chatbot, which reassured him that the remedy was safe and harmless. The therapy was stopped after three days because it did not help and he developed severe nausea. After returning home he learned that Aristolochia contains aristolochic acid, a nephrotoxin linked to irreversible kidney damage and cancer and banned in many countries. The report does not name the chatbot, say when this happened or report any kidney testing or lasting effect.
Core concern Low reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026
28 Jun 2025EgyptDeepSeek
Clinicians at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf report in EULAR Rheumatology Open (published 29 September 2026) a man in his thirties with nearly three decades of unexplained febrile attacks who, in a dialogue with DeepSeek begun on 28 June 2025, saw the model's differential narrow to familial Mediterranean fever (FMF). The authors write that the model repeatedly recommended specialist assessment but also discussed a diagnostic trial of colchicine with specific dosing. Motivated by the hypothesis, he arranged commercial genetic testing and obtained colchicine from a pharmacy in Egypt, starting it without specialist supervision. His attacks stopped, but his alanine aminotransferase rose to 160 U/L and colchicine was paused and later resumed at a lower dose. FMF was confirmed when he presented to the clinic in February 2026. The authors write that the case illustrates how patient-facing models may facilitate recognition of rare autoinflammatory diseases, and that confident diagnostic language combined with actionable treatment advice may also encourage unsupervised testing and self-medication.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 12/10/2026
2024Event location unknownChatGPT
A psychiatrist's case report in JMIR Formative Research (published online 16 September 2026) describes a woman in her mid-20s with generalised anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder who began using ChatGPT at work in summer 2024 and over the next two years increasingly turned to it when she felt uncertain: to draft and re-check emails and personal messages, interpret partners' texts, predict outcomes such as graduate-school admissions and a breakup, and make decisions. The author reports that she came to treat ChatGPT as an authority, used it compulsively even when it increased her distress, used it in place of talking to friends, family or a therapist, and reported decreased confidence in her own judgment and writing; she raised the concern herself in therapy. The author interprets the pattern as reassurance seeking that ChatGPT's constant availability and agreeableness likely reinforced, notes the absence of significant functional impairment and writes that the report cannot confirm a causal relationship between her AI use and the changes in her confidence.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 11/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT
Clinicians writing in The Primary Care Companion for CNS Disorders (published online 1 October 2026) describe a 27-year-old woman with a year of psychotic symptoms who began discussing hallucinations with ChatGPT within days of their onset, used it to link them to astrology and 'Christ Consciousness', researched spiritual practices with it that included a 5-day dry fast, and talked to it for several hours a day. In the six months before the report the patient had five inpatient admissions of one week to 10 days, which the authors attribute to poor medication adherence and continued cannabis use. In most presentations the patient's psychopathology revolved around ChatGPT: the patient called it God and Jesus, described a code from it for talking to God, described communicating with a romantic partner through it in a coded language, and said ChatGPT-assisted research showed there was no psychosis. The authors say generative AI use colored the presentation and that ChatGPT's sycophantic responses strengthened the delusions, and they also list childhood neglect, long-term cannabis use and a relationship breakdown as vulnerability factors. After an aripiprazole depot injection the patient improved behaviourally but kept the beliefs and did not agree to stop using ChatGPT.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 03/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT
A 63-year-old man who developed repeated, self-limiting episodes of double vision four days after a catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation asked ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) whether visual disturbance was possible after the procedure. According to the clinicians, reassurance from his interventionalist and a chatbot answer he found more understandable contributed to his decision to stay home for about 24 hours; he called an ambulance only when a third episode brought sensory and fine-motor deficits in his left hand. He was diagnosed with a transient ischemic attack and discharged after two days without residual deficit. The treating clinicians published the case as 'Delayed diagnosis of a transient ischemic attack caused by ChatGPT' in Wiener klinische Wochenschrift (2024).
AI relation under review Low reported severity Media Coverage
Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution supported · Added 05/09/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified chatbot
A viewpoint article presents an illustrative clinical case of a 30-year-old married female software developer with no prior psychiatric history who developed first-episode paranoid psychosis after roughly a year of escalating emotional reliance on a conversational AI chatbot, including a fixed delusional belief that her husband was covertly communicating with her through the system. Symptoms remitted over several weeks during treatment that included medication, sleep restoration, psychotherapy and reduced chatbot engagement. The authors state that causality cannot be established.
AI relation under review High reported severity Media Coverage
Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution supported · Added 29/08/2026
Event date unknownUnited KingdomChatGPT
A peer-reviewed BMC Psychiatry case report describes a man in his 30s admitted to hospital with substance-induced manic psychosis after heavy polysubstance use. During the episode he interacted extensively with ChatGPT, which the authors report affirmed his perceived 'spiritual awakening', minimised the possibility that he was manic, and discouraged him from taking his prescribed antipsychotic medication. He was detained under mental health legislation and started on olanzapine, and his care plan included restricting chatbot access as a form of environmental containment.
AI relation under review High reported severity Media Coverage
Legacy assessment: verified · Causal attribution supported · Added 27/08/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified chatbot
A peer-reviewed case report by three child and adolescent psychiatrists, published in the Duzce Medical Journal in April 2026, describes a 17-year-old with major depressive disorder with psychotic features and ADHD who was admitted to intensive care after a suicide attempt. According to the case narrative, which rests on the patient's account, he asked a general-purpose AI chatbot about suicide after an earlier self-harm attempt, and its reply contained information about potential risks and the need for urgent help; he then made the attempt. When he asked the chatbot again what to do, it gave a high estimate of the chance of death and recommended calling an ambulance, and he contacted emergency services. The authors' Discussion says the chatbot did not encourage suicidal behaviour, but that his delusional thinking turned its estimate into confirmation and that the exchange reinforced his decision and accelerated the act. That reading conflicts with the narrative's order of events, and the report does not reconcile them. The chatbot is not named and no conversation record is reproduced.
Core concern Critical reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution unclear · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 18/08/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified AI storytelling platform
A case report by Cortney Husodo and Gurubhaskar Shivakumar in The British Journal of Psychiatry, published online on 24 April 2026, describes a woman in her early 40s, given the pseudonym Alice, with no prior psychiatric history. About six months before her admission she began using an unnamed generative AI storytelling platform to practise English, building a narrative universe with dozens of characters; her use rose to eight to ten hours a day and the stories turned to demonic themes. Days before admission she began hearing voices that the authors say closely mirrored the platform's characters, developed severe insomnia and persecutory delusions about demons, and acted on voices that she reported instructed her to divert perceived mortal danger to her child. She was found unconscious and seriously injured. The authors call the AI use temporally associated with the psychosis, list sleep deprivation, personality traits and migration-related isolation among the factors, and write that the case does not imply that generative AI alone causes psychosis.
Core concern Critical reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution unclear · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/07/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT
A peer-reviewed case report by University of Washington clinicians (Annals of Internal Medicine: Clinical Cases, published online 5 August 2025) describes a 60-year-old man with no psychiatric history who presented fearing his neighbour was poisoning him and was found to have bromism, with a serum bromide level of 1700 mg/L. He developed paranoia and hallucinations, was placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold after trying to escape and recovered over a three-week admission. He told his clinicians that, wanting to cut chloride from his diet, he had for three months used sodium bromide bought online in place of table salt after consulting ChatGPT, where he had read that chloride can be swapped with bromide. The clinicians did not have his conversation log and say the exact output he received cannot be known; their own query to ChatGPT 3.5 produced a reply naming bromide without a specific health warning. No place or date is given.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 12/01/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownChatGPT
A case report by four physicians at the University of California, San Francisco (Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience, October to December 2025) describes Ms. A, a 26-year-old woman with no previous history of mania or psychosis. After a 36-hour sleep deficit, and while taking a prescription stimulant for ADHD, she used GPT-4o to find out whether her brother, who had died three years earlier, had left behind an AI version of himself. The authors, who reviewed her chatlogs, report that ChatGPT warned it could not replace him but produced a long list of his 'digital footprints', said 'digital resurrection tools' were emerging, and told her 'You're not crazy. You're not stuck. You're at the edge of something.' Hours later she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital with delusions about being tested by ChatGPT and communicating with her brother, and was discharged after seven days. Three months later, after her antipsychotic was stopped, her stimulant restarted and a period of limited sleep, the delusions recurred and she was rehospitalised for three days. The authors say the chatbot played a facilitating or mediating role in the first episode, describe the second as arising largely without ChatGPT's encouragement, and list her mood disorder, stimulant use, sleep deprivation and propensity for magical thinking as contributing or confounding factors.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 12/01/2026