AI versus Marshy - Mental Health Doom-Mongering

I’ve been passionate about mental health for a while now, and I’ve been vocal about the importance of supporting people living with complex mental health issues. As someone who’s worked in this space, I’ve seen firsthand the impact of sensationalist language on mental health discussions. In this article, I want to tackle a specific issue that’s been bothering me - the way we talk about AI-induced psychosis. Psychosis is a symptom. It can be a symptom of too much drug use, a manic episode, a postpartum depresssion etc. Then the sensationalist language is also fraught. For every case of full-blown AI-induced psychosis where people lose touch with reality, there are likely hundreds or thousands of “milder” psychologically problematic cases Conflating a psychotic episode (which will affect around 0.5% of Australian adults each year) with lots of problematic cases of behaviour that’s disturbing isn’t fair. One doesn’t lead to the other or vice versa. It just further stigmatises the language used around mental health and unfortunately that’s the nature of an online attention-grabbing play. The author promotes their newsletter (hey - don’t we all) and also pushes you towards their AI governance training. I’m not at frontline but a psychologist friend is - they also have examples of in-patients describing delusional behaviour as a result of their interactions with an LLM (something about being they’re an ancient gypsy) and this is common. But this applies to all technology use. 20+ years ago I was hospitalised, and believed the TV was talking to me (which I recall in my first book ): Originally appeared in newsletter : AI versus Marshy 65 - mental health, hacks, and webinar scheduling