Also even things like cable news I'd say cause comparable symptoms.

I don't know how to say this in a way that isn't so negative... but how are people such profound followers that they can put themselves into a feedback loop that results is psychosis?

I think it's an education problem, not as in people are missing facts but by the missing basic brain development to be critical of incoming information.

▲

Flowzone 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

I was in psychosis for about a month a few years ago. Before it happened, I didn't really understand what psychosis was. I had heard about people having paranoid delusions, and thought something like that could never happen to me, because the delusions all sounded so irrational. I thought I was too much of a critical thinker to ever be susceptible to something like that.

What I experienced was that psychosis isn't a failure of logic or education. I had never believed in a single conspiracy theory (and I don't now), but during that month I believed all sorts of wild conspiratorial things.

What you're describing with cable news sounds more like 1) Cognitive bias, which everyone has, but yes can be improved. And 2) a social phenomenon, where they create this shared reality of not just information, but a social identity, and they keep feeding that beast.

However, when those people hold beliefs that sound irrational to outsiders, that's not necessarily the same thing as psychotic delusions.

When I was in psychosis, it definitely seemed like more of a hardware issue than a software issue if that makes sense. Sometimes software issues can lead to hardware issues though.

	▲	N_Lens 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I’ve experienced psychosis and it definitely leans more towards a hardware issue. The reason I think this is apophenia - seeing connections where none exist - is a particular state of the mind where neural connection making is highly elevated. In my lay experience it’s as though dopamine, acetylcholine, and norepinephrine are all chronically elevated and create internal feedback loops, which causes a spiral/cascade of accelerated meaning making and increased neural connectivity. This is also experienced physically and mentally as mania, paranoia, anxiety. This is probably why antipsychotics usually work by damping down on these neurotransmitters really hard, and by preventing that accelerating cascade they interrupt the illness process.
	▲	SequoiaHope 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Any idea what caused it? Reminds me of a family member who was addicted to meth and started believing all kinds of wild stuff.

▲

djmips 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I feel that's probably not always true but certainly a good education you would hope could inoculate against this generally.

	▲	colechristensen 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		"Liberal Arts" was originally meant to be literally the education required to make you free, I think that sort of thing (and universities and lower education) needs to be rethought because so many people are so very... dependent and lacking so much understanding of the world around them. If exposing you to an LLM causes psychosis you have some really big problems that need to be prevented, detected, and addressed much better.

▲

dingnuts 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

never heard of cable news convincing people that they're Jesus [0]

0 https://www.vice.com/en/article/chatgpt-is-giving-people-ext...