From the Editor
ChatGPT is the most downloaded app in history. People turn to AI for travel tips and restaurant advice. But what about its impact on those vulnerable to psychosis? Or those experiencing psychosis?
In a new research letter published in JAMA Psychiatry, Zachary Bergson (of Vanderbilt University) and his co-authors attempt to answer those questions by analyzing more than 200 000 mental health notes at an academic centre. “In this systematic analysis of AI psychosis, documented in the EHR of a large US medical setting, psychosis-worsening interactions with conversational AI were most common among patients experiencing their first episode of psychosis.” We consider the study and its implications.
In the second selection, from The American Journal of Psychiatry, Naomi Cruz (of Rutgers University) and her co-authors look at benzodiazepine dispensing in the United States, using data on 1.1 billion prescriptions. “From 2013 to 2024, the national prevalence of dispensed benzodiazepine prescriptions declined by more than one-quarter, with reductions across all patient age groups and most prescriber types as well as in the mean dose dispensed per benzodiazepine prescription.”
And in the third selection, from The Washington Post, Dr. Nebyou Belay, a psychiatrist, writes about the influence of the Internet on psychiatric diagnoses. He argues that social media can encourage people – particularly young people – to adopt psychiatric diagnoses before their symptoms have been properly assessed, blurring the line between normal distress and mental illness. “Psychiatry should help people understand what they are experiencing. Increasingly, however, the Internet gets there first.”
DG
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