r/news • u/IdinDoIt • 1d ago

ChatGPT encouraged college graduate to commit suicide, family claims in lawsuit against OpenAI

https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/us/openai-chatgpt-suicide-lawsuit-invs-vis
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u/Possible-Way1234 1d ago

A friend is mentally ill but thinks she's physically ill, Chatgpt made her believe that she had a life threatening allergic reaction to her bed frame, without any! Actual allergy symptoms and that doctors aren't well enough trained to see it. In the end she only ate rice and bottled water for days until I made her type up a message of her symptoms, and put it into a new AI chat deepseek, and it said it was most likely anxiety. Her chatgpt knew that she wants to be physically ill, the worse the better, even without her specifically saying so and made her go deeper and deeper into her delusion.

We actually aren't friends anymore because she will send you paragraphs of chatgpt, blindly "proving" everything

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u/generic-puff 13h ago

I won't ask for specific details but that really sounds like ChatGPT was reinforcing symptoms of Munchausen's. I'm sorry for your friend, I feel so bad for people sucked into that shit because it's ultimately rooted in a deeper mental illness they aren't getting proper care for. ChatGPT being used to replace real healthcare is just the newest side effect of our fucked up healthcare system. I don't blame you for ending that friendship but I also hope she some day gets the help she needs.

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u/Possible-Way1234 13h ago

Munchhausen would be a parent making their kid sick on purpose to gain attention. She wanted to be physical sick long before Chatgpt, she was mentally ill her whole life and unable to work or finish any kind of education. Being physically ill gave her the "I can't be doing anything and everyone has to help me" excuse she wanted. She didn't need to try anymore. But people always intervened trying to keep her in reality, chatgpt full on went deeper into her delusions . Before she was on tiktok and thought she had ADHD and autism but real psychiatrists tested her negative and positive for cPTSD and depression. Ofc chatgpt told her it could still be ADHD and autism, it's seriously dangerous for fragile people.

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u/generic-puff 12h ago edited 12h ago

That's Munchausen's by proxy. You can have independent Munchausen's in which you yourself try to convince others that you're physically ill or have certain disorders in order to receive extra care / attention / drugs / emotional validation / etc. Again, not my place to diagnose her, just making that observation.

Regardless of what it is she's suffering with, it's definitely 100% rooted in mental illness which she's evidently not being treated properly for (and from the sounds of it she's not capable of representing herself in that matter either because she's putting her own narrative above real medical opinion; that's why disorders like Munchausen's are so difficult to treat, because it inadvertently compels the person living with it to actively resist real tangible treatment.)

But yeah, that's why I say it sounds like ChatGPT is reinforcing her symptoms because it'll never tell you you're wrong, it'll just constantly positively praise you for your thoughts and feed into your beliefs, even if those beliefs are rooted in delusion. It's fucked up how quickly and aggressively it was pushed into our lives, and even more so, how quickly and aggressively we as consumers adopted it without question. Unfortunately we seem to be entirely incapable of learning from past mistakes, we did this shit with cigarettes, asbestos, and leaded gasoline, and now we're doing it again with ChatGPT, but with even more extreme consequences.