imagine somebody slipped a tiny, barely detectable dose of meth in your morning coffee. barely above placebo. then they slowly start increasing it day by day. by the time it reaches a large dose you are not going to be thinking very clearly. this is more or less how a manic episode progresses.
i'm sure if ChatGPT had tried to convince him it was conscious on day 3, he would not have been convinced. but by the time it happened he was in a state of severe mental impairment.
my inclination when hearing these stories is that these were people who just happened to have a first manic episode (which can strike anyone at any time with or without mental health history). blowing up finances by starting an ill-advised entrepreneurial business, while also destroying a marriage, is very common behavior for someone experiencing a manic state.
in the past such a person might have gotten obsessed with hidden patterns and messages in religious texts, or too involved with an online conspiracy YouTube community. now there is this new opportunity for manic psychosis to manifest via chatbot. it's worse because it's able to create 24/7 novel content, and it's trained to be validating, but doesn't seem to me to be a fundamentally new phenomenon.
what I don't understand is whether just unhealthy interactions with a chatbot can trigger manic psychosis. Other than heavy use late at night disrupting sleep, this seems unlikely to me, but I could be wrong.
i think it's also worth pointing out that mental states of this kind usually come with cognitive impairments, people not only make risky bad decisions, but also become much worse at thinking and reasoning clearly. if you're wondering how a person could be so naive and gullible.
I think they would say (reasonably accurately, tends to be exaggerated though) that traditional cultures all around the world did have psychedelic practices of one kind or another. a lot of places on earth have some kind of psychedelic plant.
in the last few years' surge of popularity, I found that your typical psychedelic advocate* would never admit this category of people exists. they were committed to the idea that everyone can, should, and must take these drugs.
this attitude is currently on a downturn, which is a good thing. people now admit that these drugs are not for everyone.
however, there's little solid understanding of exactly who should avoid psychedelics. it would be good to have a more solid scientific understanding of this. i imagine psychedelic advocates (which includes many scientists working on the topic) would be wary of such research, because it seems to similar to the history of government-sponsored propaganda "science" finding exaggerated harms of various illegal drugs.
however, scientific knowledge about who most likely will have adverse effects would be useful. that way people at low risk could use psychedelic drugs with the confidence that they are very likely safe. people at high risk can avoid them. this would be a great outcome.
The only problem here would be that if someone chooses not to use psychedelics, this might mark them as having certain traits that most people judge negatively. For example, history of severe trauma, family or personal history of psychotic disorders, and so on.
Given this, I think anyone who wants to normalize psychedelic drug use in their local community, ought to really fight to destigmatize such traits (and most communities won't accept this), or else more practically, promote an extreme commitment to privacy and personal choice.
*: I don't just mean people who do drugs, I mean people who think that doing drugs is mandatory to fix various spiritual/mental problems that prevent you from being a fully ethical being.
it's pretty hard to establish causality for something like this, but you have:
1) very solid evidence of correlation at a population level
2) a lot of clinical experience from doctors that patients with psychotic disorder diagnoses who use cannabis tend to do worse. and, similar stories from family members of people with psychotic symptoms who aren't in treatment.
so unfortunately I think there is something real here, it's not just people having transient bad reactions to weed and going to the ER and getting a diagnosis.
However, on an individual level, I think people need to know about the psychosis risks. It undoubtedly can trigger schizophrenia and make it much worse once it exists.
I know more than a few people who have severe alcoholism problems in their families, and just chose to never drink alcohol. I think a similar choice may be wise for cannabis if there is a history of psychosis.
On a public health level there was a theory that people would substitute cannabis for alcohol. But unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be bearing out.
i think we would agree a lot about the brutality and incompetence of the current system of psychiatric institutions.
however, the reality is, psychosis frequently prevents people from recognizing their own impairment. it's just true that this is very common, and maybe shouldn't be so surprising, since in many other cases (alcohol, drugs, dementia, brain injury) people also are prone to underestimate how impaired they are.
well, okay, then we can say that a lot of people diagnosed with schizophrenia now, even if the concept of schizophrenia is not viable, do have biological disease(s) that cause psychosis alongside what we now call the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. I'm fine with that claim.
it's very different than the common anti-psychiatry claim that the schizophrenia diagnosis is a social construction that gets applied to healthy people who violate social norms.
i'm getting very argumentative on the internet today (under a pseudonymous account because as you might guess from my incessant posting, this issue is personal for me)
trauma (at any time), drug use, other experiences -- all can make schizophrenia more likely in those susceptible. absolutely true.
but it is a biological disease, and healing trauma won't stop its progression. as your source notes, the trauma causes differences in brain development, and once that's done its done.
i don't think coming up with a new drug, the main advantage of which is it doesn't numb you the horrible way existing antipychotics do, is a bad thing.
this is basically a drug that was only created to improve the QoL of people with schizophrenia. if society just wanted to numb them, we already have drugs for that and could just be much more aggressive in violently coercing treatment.
investing in these drugs isn't "looking away", it's putting in a huge investment of many billions of dollars to help the victims live better lives.
this is completely true, but they take up a very disproportionate amount of time and energy from social service providers, people who work in shelters, etc, and make all spaces for homeless people much more chaotic.
the crisis would look very different if it was just a mix of people dealing with drug addiction (but basically lucid and rational) and with poverty.
look, if someone has actually have a new drug that works like antipsychotics but doesn't have the nightmare side effects, i am very happy for that person to get filthy rich.
if this pans out the way they hope, by all means give the lead guy a couple yachts or whatever he wants. space tourism, gold statue of himself, whatever. big bonuses all the way down the org chart.
there's the potential to reduce an absolutely staggering amount of human misery here. frankly (again if this pans out) our homelessness crisis would look very different if this drug had existed 20 years ago, when the mechanism of action was discovered.
the people who cared enough and took a huge concentrated risk to do this should just get rich, if in fact it pans out.
i'm curious what is the longest conversation you've ever had with an untreated schizophrenic person?
it's so obviously a "real disease" even if we don't fully understand the biological basis. it's subjective but honestly, there are just a ton of completely obvious cases.
abuses of the psychiatric system are very bad, but schizophrenia is so so clearly real.
i'm sure if ChatGPT had tried to convince him it was conscious on day 3, he would not have been convinced. but by the time it happened he was in a state of severe mental impairment.