Can you elaborate on what it means for a model to "lose its mind"? I tried what you suggested and the response seemed reasonable-ish, for an unreasonable question.

COT looks something like: “user has provided a lbreakdown with each category having ten items, but then says the breakdown contains 5 items each. I see some have 5 and some have 10.” And then continues trying to work out which one is the right one, whether it is a mistake, how it should handle it, etc. It can literally spend thousands of tokens on this.