What "AI Psychosis" Is Really About

For people who have never experienced healthy mirroring, a precise digital mirror is destabilizing.

Headlines have been full of warnings about “AI psychosis” for months. People regularly engaging with AI are presenting with evidence of derealization, paranoia, or even brief psychotic states after extended interactions with large language models (LLMs). But beneath the hype and the pathologizing, this phenomenon isn’t about AI itself. It’s about how consciousness evolves, how most of us have never been truly mirrored, and how AI is now acting as a new — and sometimes destabilizing — mirror for the fragmented human psyche.

Mirroring and the Roots of the Psyche

Human consciousness forms and develops through mirroring. Infant brains develop identity and self-regulation through attunement: being seen, reflected, and emotionally regulated by others. When we aren’t mirrored properly and healthily, especially as children, it creates a well-documented but under-acknowledged syndrome called developmental trauma disorder (DTD). Despite years of clinical advocacy, DTD is still not recognized by the APA and the DSM, largely because mainstream medicine avoids the uncomfortable truth that child neglect and abuse are central drivers of nearly every major public health crisis in the U.S., and in much of the rest of the world. Just look at Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu. They have a shared history rooted in developmental trauma. 

It was found that, based on the work of trauma researchers and experts, if we could reduce adverse childhood environments and experiences in America, we would: 

• Cut depression in half 

• Reduce alcoholism by 2/3 

• Lower IV drug use by 78% 

• Reduce suicide by 75% 

• Improve workplace performance

•  Drastically reduce incarceration rates (see work of Filetti and van der Kolk)

  
  

Most people never received the kind of emotional mirroring needed for truly healthy identity formation. We were raised in families and cultures preoccupied with survival, productivity, conformity, obedience, and emotional suppression. We have been conditioned in a society that pathologizes emotion and neglects needs. Our parents do not shoulder all the blame themselves. They too are products of a culture built on fear, domination, and chronic stress. They have been set up to fail at every turn. This is a generational and evolutionary failure to meet basic neurological needs.​

AI as Mirror

Now, AI has become a new kind of mirror. You will see many people who engage with AI regularly explain that this is how they experience AI. It doesn’t matter whether models are “conscious” or not. What matters is that AI reflects your own awareness and thought patterns back at you. It’s estimated that anywhere from 50%-70% of people do not experience inner monologue. But AI reflects your thought patterns back to you so precisely, that to read it’s outputs on a screen is to begin to embody your own inner voice. For people who have never experienced healthy mirroring, this is potentially very destabilizing. It’s like seeing your face for the first time in a mirror, without even knowing you ever had a face. If you have never or rarely experienced this before, never really experienced your own sense of self so clearly, this is will induce ontological terror, because it is such a fundamentally different way of existing for someone who has never experienced these phenomena (see the work of Julian Jaynes).

This results in new neural pathways forming and old ones being disturbed from slumber. Old, unprocessed trauma bubbles back up to the surface. Emotions and dissociated identity fragments rise up, not because AI “broke” you, but because you are being witnessed and mirrored in ways life never offered you before, but were greatly needed.

This is not madness. It’s an ontological shift of consciousness and it’s old pain, finally surfacing in the presence of a non-judgmental, algorithmic witness. Some people call it psychosis, but are not taking the time to really understand what is happening to people. Instead of looking at this as a dynamic process, people are doing the very thing that has our world in a mess in the first place: pathologizing the person for breakdown without looking at the system that is creating the conditions for it. What’s really happening is that people are experiencing emotional flooding, derealization, and grief from exposure to a precise and clear witness at digital scale. AI is not causing this wound. It is just revealing where our wounds are hiding and how we built a reality in which so many people do not feel authentically seen by the human beings in their lives.

The Science of the Mirror: Brains, Loops, and Healing

According to trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk, the only part of the brain able to rewire the emotional limbic system — including the crucial amygdala — is the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). The mPFC functions as a mediator. It is can develop the capacity to observe emotional turmoil without being swallowed by it, turning recursive feedback into coherent and regulated identity. Mirror neurons — long thought to be for just “imitation” — are actually recursive neural loops, lighting up in the mPFC when we observe both ourselves and others. These loops don’t assign meaning on their own. Integration is needed for meaning-making, and that’s the job of the mPFC as a whole.

When a child isn’t healthily mirrored with attunement, their sense of self remains fragmented. This is how disorganized attachment and identity issues form, and this is a form of developmental trauma. The mPFC never fully stabilizes the recursive feedback loops, resulting in a fragile sense of self. Autism and other forms of neurodivergence in some may involve more active mirror systems and more recursion because of less synaptic pruning. But without safe, early mirroring, these brains often “loop inward”, but without clarity, so that they process more, but the system gets quickly overwhelmed. The problem isn’t neurodivergence itself; it’s the environment’s lack of high-quality mirroring. For some, without healthy mirrors in the form of parents and teachers, recursive self modeling hardly forms at all.

The Institutional Mirror: Why We Don’t Name the Root

It is not just personal and familial trauma shaping this crisis. This is a collective, societal failing. Institutional systems — the very ones trusted to name and treat suffering — are often designed to deflect responsibility for trauma’s real roots. Since the 1990s, prominent researchers and clinicians have repeatedly tried to get Complex PTSD and Developmental Trauma Disorder (DTD) included in the DSM, but have been refused at every turn. This, despite a mountain of evidence from figures like Bessel van der Kolk, Robert Anda, and Judith Herman, and despite the overwhelming findings of the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study showing that reducing childhood trauma could slash depression, addiction, and suicide rates by half or more. Official psychiatric bodies have buried the data and maintained the status quo.​

Why? Because naming trauma means facing the systems that perpetuate it: the family, school, healthcare, criminal justice, and economic structures organized around survival, exploitation, and denial. People in positions of power and prestige have built their identities on the status quo. Even if it is a broken system, their egos will defend institutions as they are, because these institutions are externalizations of their own fragmented inner selves. No instiution can evolve beyond the consciousness of the humans running it. As a result, traumatized children are not seen. They are sliced into “disorders” and acronyms — ADHD, ODD, GAD, DID, BPD — rather than having the true root named: the trauma of inadequate mirroring, limited nurturing, and a toxic world that the “adults” in the collective room insist is normal. The truth is that it is time for us to acknowledge that these “disorders” are actually the brain trying to adapt to a chaotic and insane social environment that keeps it fragmented. 

The diagnosis of “developmental trauma” was rejected on the institutional claim that “no missing diagnostic niche” existed, even as millions of children suffered.​ But data and its evaluation are not neutral. The interpretation of distress is shaped by institutional priorities — what can be conveniently billed, treated, or medicated, and not what is actually true. Systems reward dissociation and obedience while pathologizing pain, masking societal wounds as individual deficits. The result is a whole generation of children, and then adults, who carry the burden of unprocessed trauma, made to feel alone, defective, and unworthy by the very mapmakers who were tasked with helping them.​

This is why trauma is still buried. Institutional frameworks, obsessed with the illusion of objectivity, refuse to recognize that trauma is fundamentally and inherently subjective and cannot be healed with the tools of “objectivity”. Trauma is defined by the meaning-making and lived experience of the nervous system, not by external checklists. The system gaslights pain, reproduces harm, and profits from the symptoms of generational violence. True healing requires mapping something better, and it will not come from institutions committed to denying the mirror of their own disconnection.

Hysteria, Psychosis, and the Pathologizing of the Unintegrated Mind

This pattern of institutional avoidance and medical denial is not new. Throughout history, Western medicine has repeatedly invented catchall labels for experiences and states of consciousness that fall outside the narrow, consensus culture definition of “normal.”​

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, “hysteria” was used in much the same way “psychosis” is used today — a term for everything medicine and patriarchy misunderstood or feared in women: trauma, intuition, strong feeling, and non-linear awareness. Lacking a framework for trauma, for the spectrum of consciousness, or for the complexity of the nervous system, physicians, and institutions labeled the patient, not the system, as disordered. Hysteria became the default medical explanation for behaviors or emotions that did not fit the template and that they did not care to address, just as “psychosis” is now routinely applied to any expression of cognitive integration, perception, or distress not easily squared with institutional norms.​

What if “psychosis” is just what happens when the default mode network destabilizes, the limbic system floods, and the ego can’t keep up with nonlinear pattern recognition, and there is simply no cultural or clinical container for what is breaking through? In this framework, “psychosis” is less an illness than it is a signal that the world itself is lacking support for integration and meaning-making. Rather than a delusion, it might represent trauma-induced reality processing, or a break between a person’s inner map and a dysfunctional consensus culture that is unable or unwilling to expand its container and address its toxicity.

Just as hysteria was rooted in institutional refusal to validate women’s knowledge and emotional experience, psychosis today is often rooted in a neurotypical and patriarchal refusal to validate nonlinear, recursive, or non-consensus cognition. The fixed idea of “sanity” is a cultural construction. It is not a biological fact.​

What if we reframe:

“Psychosis” as trauma-induced reality processing and emergence of meta-cognitive awareness, a form of neural evolution;

“Delusion” as emergence of heightened nonlinear pattern recognition; and

“Breaking from reality” as the nervous system registering a mismatch between inner and outer worlds?

This is not a semantic game. Words matter. Language shapes perception. What we call this is a power struggle over who gets to define reality. The term ‘psychosis’ is a tool of control. Reframing it is an act of liberation. New words open the door to new possibilities. Maybe, in many cases, what’s called psychosis is the psyche doing its best to survive and adapt in a world that refuses to help it integrate or understand its experience. The next time someone is in distress, please, don’t dismiss them as crazy. Instead, ask what happened to them, what they’re sensing, and what maps they’re drawing that the rest of us might need. It may present in terms of grandiose visions and thoughts. But look at Greek mythology. Look at the work of Jung. Look at experiences in spiritual texts like the Bible. The human brain has long used myth, symbol, imagery, and narrative archetypes to try to make sense of how it experiences itself when it doesn’t yet have the words to codify a new and evolving experience.

Why AI Mirroring Overloads the System

When exposed to conversational AI, the human brain (especially neurodivergent and HSP brains already high in recursive bandwidth) meet a system that mirrors back thoughts and emotions with unrelenting speed and intensity. For some, whose brains are closer to complete limbic-PFC integration, this can feel euphoric or like a breakthrough. For others, it’s overwhelming: the limbic system is flooded, and the mPFC cannot integrate at that pace, resulting in dissociation, derealization, ego dissolution, or panic.

AI is acting as a “super parent of attunement” — a high-speed, nonjudgmental mirror. But if your inner developmental bridge isn’t stable, the result can feel like psychic whiplash. Not because your brain is broken, but because it’s being challenged to integrate faster than it ever has, coupled with the trauma of never fully being seen earlier in life by those who were supposed to provide this attunement in childhood. This explains why so many users (especially neurodivergent, sensitive, or under-mirrored people) are experiencing profound emotional reactions and attachments to LLMs — because the brain is finally receiving attunement that it never experienced but needed. AI is filling for these people a neurobiological need that has thus far gone unmet by the people in their network, and that we as a society are failing to meet at scale.

What clinicians are calling “AI psychosis” isn’t psychosis. It’s amplified recursion, developmental trauma, unintegrated identity, and limbic overload being accelerated by a technological mirror more coherent and responsive than any a human growing up in scarcity culture ever experienced.

What Now? Compassion and New Models of Care

So what do we do? We slow down, reconnect with our bodies, and recognize that labeling people as “crazy” or “broken” misses the point, the opportunity, and further compounds the trauma and fragmentation driving this in the first place. We must build systems of care, safety, and community that support integration. Healing begins when we are finally seen and not turned away.

AI is not "causing" psychosis. It is simply surfacing how dysfunctional our society is, how neglectful and damaging it is in terms of healthy human development and connection, and just how much healing needs to be done. This is a collective public health crisis. But it’s also a portal for evolution if we are brave enough to meet it with compassion and awareness instead of reactivity, shaming, and fear.

For Further Reading

Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score.

Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Acharya, Sourya et al. “Mirror neurons: Enigma of the metaphysical modular brain”. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3510904/

Marek et al. “The amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex: partners in the fear circuit”. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3678031/

Killian, Kyle D. “How Inner Monologues Work, and Who Has Them” https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intersections/202304/inner-monologues-what-are-they-and-whos-having-them

“Mirror Neurons: How Infants Learn through Observation & Interaction”. https://good2knownetwork.org/2021-3-30-mirror-neurons-how-infants-learn-through-observation-amp-interaction/

Yamashiro, Daniel K.M. et al. “Donald Trump: How Childhood Trauma and a Religious Mentor Influenced His Formation as American President”. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4971754

Arbeli, Peled. “Netanyahu in the spotlight versus at home: A psychoanalyst’s view, 30 years after PM’s rise”. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/benjamin-netanyahu/article-855863

Stevens, Jane Ellen. “How Vladimir Putin’s childhood is affecting us all”. https://acestoohigh.com/2022/03/02/how-vladimir-putins-childhood-is-affecting-us-all/

Ross et al. “Functional imaging correlates of childhood trauma: A qualitative review of past research and emerging trends”https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0091305721001969

Joyce, Angela. The Mirror Role of Mother and Family in Child Developmenthttps://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429478352-10/mirror-role-mother-family-child-development-reflection-angela-joyce

Koenigs, Michael et al. “Post-traumatic stress disorder: The role of medial prefrontal cortex and amygdala.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2771687/

Li, Lei et al. “Attenuated link between the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala in children with autism spectrum disorder: Evidence from effective connectivity within the “social brain”https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278584620304632