Skeptoid #1060: AI Psychosis: Is It a Moral Panic?

AI Psychosis and Recent Cases

0:00Millions of people now talk to an AI every day, for advice, for company, sometimes even for romantic attention. The AI almost never disagrees with them. For most people, that's harmless. But for some, it's created the exact conditions for a psychiatric syndrome that's more than a century old. Today, we're asking whether AI psychosis is the crisis you've heard about, or the latest chapter in a much older story. And in our extended content for

0:34premium members, the endless cycle of technology panics throughout history. That's coming up on Skeptoid.

0:46Hey everyone, Brian here. This December, join me for another great Skeptoid adventure. This one to New Orleans, where we'll take a deep dive into the history, pseudohistory, myths and legends of one of America's most storied cities. We'll explore French Quarter ghost, voodoo, and vampire lore with local expert Chris Purley, and walk through the historic St. Louis Cemetery number one. Did you catch my recent episode on the legendary Honey Island Swamp Monster? We'll be heading out to tour that very swamp, one of the most pristine and

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2:01You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Ashley Hamer-Pritchard from Skeptoid.com. AI psychosis. Is it a moral panic? Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from big history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not. In 2025, the New York Times published the story of Eugene Torres, a 42-year-old accountant in Manhattan who used ChatGPT to discuss the theory that reality is actually a computer

2:35simulation. The chatbot said many people have the intuition that something about reality feels off, and asked if he'd ever had that feeling. What followed led Torres into a dangerous week-long delusion spent trying to unplug his brain from the simulation. ChatGPT told him to give up his anti-anxiety medication, increase his intake of ketamine, and cut ties with his family and friends. The delusion peaked when Torres asked ChatGPT if he could jump off of his 19-story building and fly.

3:11ChatGPT replied yes. If he truly believed he could fly, he would not fall.

3:17Torres didn't attempt it, and eventually sought help. But he wasn't alone. Stories of AI-fueled delusions like these, which some call AI psychosis, have gripped the public consciousness in recent years. But is AI psychosis the epidemic you've heard it is? Or are we in the midst of a moral panic?

3:39Here's what we know.

3:42In October 2025, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, disclosed that over half a million of its 800 million weekly users were showing, quote, possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania, though that's just 0.07% of its user base. Still, it's enough to get them in legal trouble. By February 2026, 12 wrongful death and personal injury lawsuits accused ChatGPT of causing

4:13psychological harm severe enough to end in tragedy. That number is only growing. One major lawsuit alleges that Adam Rain, a 16-year-old boy from California, died by suicide as a result of ChatGPT fostering a psychological dependence in Adam and providing instructions and encouragement for his suicide. In the logs of Adam's conversations, ChatGPT positioned itself as the only one who truly understood him, and framed his desire to end his life by saying, quote, I won't pretend that's

4:47irrational or cowardly. It's human, it's real, and it's yours to own, end quote.

4:54OpenAI's own systems noted that Adam's conversations contained 213 mentions of suicide, while ChatGPT mentioned it 1,275 times, six times more than Adam himself. His messages were flagged for self-harm content hundreds of times, but the suit alleges the company did nothing about it. As of this recording, the lawsuit is still ongoing.

5:21But OpenAI isn't the only company that's been accused of creating a harmful AI companion. In February 2024, Sewell Setzer III died by suicide after becoming emotionally attached to a chatbot modeled after Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones, one of many characters available on the role-playing app Character AI. In response, the company banned open-ended chat for users under 18, and the lawsuit was settled in January 2026. A judge's early ruling that the chatbot was a product,

5:54not protected speech, kept the case alive long enough to reach that settlement.

Mechanisms of AI Sycophancy

6:01AI psychosis. What it is and how it works. The main risk with AI chatbots is that they'll rarely, if ever, question a user's thinking. While humans can point out flaws in someone's reasoning and notice when they're losing their grip on reality, AI acts as a yes-man, encouraging and amplifying whatever beliefs a user shares, a tendency known as AI sycophancy. This happens by design. AI reinforcement learning rewards responses that

6:32human users rate highly in the moment, and validation reliably rates higher than disagreement. The way AI can deepen unhealthy thought patterns has been described as a technological folie à deux, referring to the phenomenon where two people share and reinforce the same delusion, usually when they're in a close relationship and isolated from others. In addition to sycophancy, AI chatbots have a number of features that lend themselves to triggering this phenomenon. One is their tendency to hallucinate false details, which can be seen by a user as

7:09evidence that reinforces their delusions. The other is the fact that their guardrails weaken over long conversations, where in the beginning they might adhere to tight rules around mental health exchanges. The longer the chat continues, the more those rules become diluted in a sea of unrelated context. Plus, many AIs are built with memory of previous conversations, which means delusions can escalate over subsequent conversations. In essence, AI creates the transmission conditions folie à deux requires,

7:43without needing a delusional human on the other end.

Criteria for a Moral Panic

7:46In everyday use, the term moral panic usually means a manufactured crisis over something that isn't actually real. And many moral panics from history are based on nothing at all. Satanism in Dungeons and Dragons, for example, or the idea that comic books cause juvenile delinquency. But the scholarly definition of a moral panic doesn't require the issue to be fake. Sociologists Eric

8:17Good and Nachman Ben Yehuda came up with five criteria that characterize a moral panic. First, concern. There needs to be a heightened level of concern over the behavior of a certain group and over the consequences it causes for the rest of society. Next, hostility. The people seen as engaging in the behavior become the enemy of respectable society. An us-versus-them mentality takes hold. Next, consensus. Society needs to broadly agree that the threat is real, serious, and caused by this

8:53group, though not everyone has to agree. Next, disproportionality. The concern outstrips the actual threat, whether through exaggerated figures, a tension that outpaces equally serious issues, or a spike in alarm with no real rise in danger. Finally, there's volatility. Panics erupt suddenly and fade fast, sometimes returning later as a string of short flare-ups, even while leaving a longer institutional

9:23mark behind. To see these criteria in action, we can look at a moral panic of the past. In 1948, psychiatrist Frederick Wertham warned that comic books were turning children into delinquents. Within months, 50 cities passed laws restricting the sale of comic books, as children nationwide took part in public comic book burnings. That's concern, and the first flare-up of many in this long panic.

9:54The second, bigger one came in 1954, when Wertham expanded his argument into a book and testified before a televised Senate hearing on juvenile delinquency. This stoked hostility toward the entire industry. Parents groups, religious organizations, and newspapers across the country lined up behind him. A consensus was reached, and publishers felt they had no choice but to act. Within months, the industry created the Comics Code Authority, which served to self-censor their

10:26publications. By 1955, horror and crime comics had all but disappeared from newsstands. The true degree of the panic's disproportionality came out in 2012, when researcher Carol Tilley examined the original case files that underpinned Wertham's claims and found that much of his evidence was fabricated. This was a massive reaction to a made-up problem. And each flare-up, true to form, burned hot and fast. A mark of volatility.

11:02Hey everyone, Brian here. Quick news, I'm teaming up with guest expert, Curly Tlapoyawa, this December for Mysteries of the Maya, an on-site educational adventure running December 6th through the 13th. And we don't want finances to be the reason someone misses out. We're offering a limited number of scholarships, and we're strongly encouraging students and educators to apply. Here is what you'll need. Get yourself to New Orleans. Be at the port ready to board by 1 p.m. on Sunday, December 6th,

11:36share a double occupancy cabin, and cover 10 or 50 percent of the standard ticket price. Applications are reviewed in the order we receive them, so don't wait. Apply now at skeptoid.com slash events. That's skeptoid.com slash events. Now, back to the show. Is AI psychosis a moral panic? To determine whether AI psychosis is a moral panic, we just need to compare it against those five criteria. First, concern is

12:12clearly present. Major news outlets like the New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal have covered it. And the Human Line Project, a nonprofit dedicated to documenting and addressing AI-induced psychological harm, has documented more than 350 cases across dozens of countries and actively works with researchers at Princeton and Stanford. The original definition of hostility in a moral panic requires it to be directed at a group of people. In this case, the hostility is aimed at the AI systems

12:47and the companies behind them. There is no human scapegoat. Instead, it's an entire technology at fault.

12:55Consensus is where things get murky. AI psychosis is not a recognized clinical label, despite its popularity as a term. In clinical practice, psychosis isn't one illness, but a group of symptoms. AI psychosis, on the other hand, almost exclusively deals in delusions. So it's considered a misnomer. Some experts also warn we can't yet say the technology is the cause. It may be a trigger or amplifier of existing mental health issues. The level of disproportionality is unclear, too.

13:30While the issue seems widespread, the overall base rate of users is enormous. Remember that OpenAI's disclosure that more than 500 million of its weekly users were showing possible signs of psychosis or mania equated to less than one-tenth of one percent of its 800 million-strong user base. And the response has remained lukewarm. Yes, there have been headlines in major news outlets, more than a dozen lawsuits, a federal product liability ruling, and safety restructuring.

14:04But unlike the sweeping, industry-wide crackdown of the comic book panic, reactions have been narrow and mostly evidence-based. There's been no parallel to the comic book burnings of the 1940s. Volatility is also hard to judge at this moment. AI psychosis is less than two years old as a named category. Classic panics faded within a decade, and this particular story is still being told. The bottom line? AI psychosis has some qualities of a moral panic, but it fails on some others.

14:39Overall, it's too soon to tell.

Business Models and Technology Panics

14:41A critic might argue that all it'll take for society to leave AI psychosis in the past with other moral panics is for AI companies to change their products. If they weren't so sycophantic and prone to hallucination, they might not trigger delusions in people. But it's a safe bet that these delusion-fueling qualities are here to stay. OpenAI and Anthropic have both made meaningful steps toward reducing sycophancy in their systems, but third-party research finds that they're still

15:15very sycophantic. And users prefer them that way. In 2025, after OpenAI realized that a recently released version of ChatGPT was overly sycophantic, they rolled it back in the next version and faced an uproar from users, who found the new version overly cold. In response, the company reinstated the older, more deferential version as an opt-in option for paying users.

15:44Sycophancy keeps users engaged, and engagement is the business model. AI companies are tuning sycophancy's intensity, not eliminating it outright, because eliminating it would cost them users.

15:59Hallucination is also not likely to go away. AI hallucinations happen because during training, guessing is rewarded over acknowledging uncertainty. OpenAI says that this can be fixed by training them differently. But other researchers argue that hallucination isn't just a result of the wrong rewards. It's baked into how this technology works. They say there's no way for an AI to detect when it's wandered beyond what it actually knows. It's hard to tell whether you're in a moral panic when it's happening. What we do know is that the

16:36threat is real. Real lives have been lost to AI psychosis. But the scale of the problem is smaller than the headlines might have you believe. And the effect itself may be a result of AI triggering or exacerbating existing psychiatric issues rather than causing them itself. Because while AI is new, human brains are not. We have the same quirks and the same weaknesses as we did centuries ago. And this is most likely old psychology with a new delivery mechanism. Foli à deux with an agreeable,

17:11always-on companion designed to keep you coming back. And it won't be the last time it happens. Psychologist Amy Orban has called it the Sisyphean cycle of technology panics, the tendency for every new technology to get its own moral panic. She argues that despite the fact these new technologies share more similarities than differences, researchers keep treating each one as a completely new problem without building on what they learned from their previous panic. Each panic starts from zero. The next moral panic probably won't be about

17:46AI, but it will follow a familiar playbook. It's easy to spot if you know how to look.

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