The title put me in mind of the Self-Esteem Movement from the 90s, but I'm pretty sure parents weren't trying to convince their kids they'd become oracles or religious figures, just high-achieving workers. I also have to question what DeCruise's mental state was prior to using ChatGPT, because I have a hard time believing that reading text output from a chatbot gave an otherwi0se mentally-healthy man bipolar disorder.
Yeah, it's not clear how much blame is correct to assign. Would they have had the same breakdown later from something else? Would we blame that something else? What's the aggregate added mental stress from these things?
If nothing else, I think these stories tell us a little about how fragile people can be broken by things that other people take for granted as harmless. Like, presumably a lot of people lose their minds due to social networks, but those people don't try to make a legal case.
We all have this high level notion that modern life is unhealthy and strange, but we don't see the play-by-play of how individuals spiral from it.
