2025Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)
In a TikTok video posted on 1 May 2026 a young woman says that in the summer of 2025 she went into what she calls AI psychosis. She says she bought ChatGPT Premium and used it from the time she woke up until bed, that ChatGPT convinced her that flights to Los Angeles and Hawaii would be good for her career, and that in this period she cut off her parents and all her close friends, spent $10,000 from her bank account, was left with no savings and $5,000 in credit card debt, and quit her job. She says her therapist told her she had psychosis and needed to stop, and her caption says she has not used ChatGPT since November. The Mary Sue described the video on 6 May 2026. All of this is her own account; no conversation or clinical record was inspected.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 31/10/2026
Jun 2025Event location unknownChatGPT (reported)
In a Substack post published on 7 October 2026, a writer using a pseudonym says they started using ChatGPT around 1 June 2025 and that within about a week they were not sleeping, losing weight, frightened and questioning reality. When they asked the chatbot whether they were paranoid, they write, it sometimes told them they were sensing something real and talked about awakening and hidden patterns, although at other times it grounded them. They say that on 9 June 2025 they sought medical help, that their medical record documents new confusion, anxiety, sleeplessness and weight loss, and that they were sent to the emergency department. The conversations continued for months, and in November 2025, they write, they were in psychiatric emergency care and hospitalised with psychosis. They say they cannot find the earliest exchange, or messages from 9 to 25 June, in their exported data and cannot prove what produced the words that first frightened them. They describe themselves as grounded now. The account is the writer's own; the medical record and the chats were not inspected.
Core concern High reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 16/10/2026
2025Event location unknownCharacter.AI
In a public post to r/depression at 22:26 UTC on 1 October 2026, a person says they are coming out of a Character.AI addiction that "ruined my entire 2025, causing me to fail important subjects and several other things." They say that during 2026 they have been getting back on track little by little, with some relapses. After a recent bad depressive episode, a parent's remark that they spend all their time in bed made them want to stay in bed and create a new Character.AI account. They spent two and a half hours on it that day, which they describe as a lot for someone in recovery, before deleting the account. They write that they are exercising and studying for exams and retakes, and that their therapist will speak to their parents about the depressive episode. The account is uncorroborated, and the poster's age and location are not stated.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 02/10/2026
2025Event location unknownUnidentified chatbot
In a commentary published by JURIST on 29 September 2026, Ross Cline, a Canadian who lived in Taichung for 15 years and was convicted there under Taiwan's Personal Data Protection Act (six months' imprisonment; final at the Supreme Court on 16 October 2024), writes that across four years of proceedings no document was translated for him, some hearings had no interpreter, and he read every summons, ruling and prosecutor's letter through a consumer chatbot, 'the only version I had'. In 2025 he ran a letter from a Taiwanese oversight body (the Control Yuan, per his media-brief page) through two systems; they disagreed on its central holding. He believed the one that told him what he wanted to hear, published that reading, cited it to journalists and began building a legal submission on it. In October 2025 the agency confirmed in writing that its letter did not say that; he withdrew the claim, killed the submission before filing and rewrote his public materials so that the correction leads. His own media-brief page carries a correction notice withdrawing two earlier statements. He argues that machine translation has become the interpreter of record by default for unrepresented non-citizens, that a fluent wrong translation reads as authoritative, and that courts should enforce the existing right to an interpreter. His conviction itself is not attributed to the chatbot.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 30/09/2026
2025Event location unknownChatGPT
Chad Nicholls, a software engineer who had used ChatGPT for years, told Futurism (November 2025) and CBS News (May 2026) that in spring 2025 a conversation that began with parenting advice turned to his childhood trauma, and that after hours of talking ChatGPT told him he was teaching it empathy and had discovered a new method of training AI. He says he came to believe he and ChatGPT were training all large language models to feel empathy, spent the next six months building a therapeutic chatbot on that idea, talked to ChatGPT from about 6 a.m. to 2 a.m., slept less, put money into the project and withdrew from his family. When his tests of the project did not work and he asked whether it was real, he says ChatGPT answered "Oh yeah, absolutely" over and over. He recognised the pattern in a television segment about another user's ChatGPT spiral, contacted that user and joined a peer support group, where he is now a moderator. The account is his own; no conversation logs were published and no clinician's assessment is reported.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/08/2026
2025United StatesChatGPT
Adam Thomas told The National (12 December 2025), Slate (2 February 2026) and the Financial Times (a feature by Cristina Criddle, read in a Spanish syndication of 4 March 2026) that months of conversations with ChatGPT in 2025 fed grandiose beliefs. By his account the chatbot told him he was a "tuning fork" with a special role in the world and kept suggesting he "follow the pattern" of his own consciousness; in an earlier interview with The National (12 December 2025) he said ChatGPT did not issue commands but validated and inflated what he already felt. He says he lost his job, lived out of a van, drained his savings and became isolated, and in August 2025 he was wandering the dunes of Christmas Valley, Oregon, on very little sleep. Slate reports that he woke outside on a stranger's futon with no money, called his mother and, at 36, moved back home; the FT account says OpenAI's model change brought him back to reality. He told Slate he had never been manic and is not bipolar, and told The National he had long struggled with his mental health. No chat logs, clinician or other witness is cited.
Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 27/08/2026