About this course

Learning Objectives

• Describe how centralized AI platforms reshape the cultural and relational context in which psychosis occurs, and identify at least two alternative approaches to AI-assisted care that center self-authorship and survivor epistemology.
• Identify interactional features of conversational AI that may contribute to distressing or destabilising belief formation, and describe potential approaches to reducing harm and preserving agency using digital advance statements.
• Explain how the social character of AI chatbots shapes their ability to co-constitute our sense of what is real and what benefits and risks this brings.

Learning Levels

• Beginning

Course Instructor(s)

• 

  Hamilton Morrin

  Hamilton Morrin is a psychiatrist and Wellcome Doctoral Fellow at the King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, where he co-leads the LAMBDA research group (Looking After Minds and Brains in the Digital Age). His research examines how conversational AI systems may shape belief, emotion and behaviour, including recent work in the Lancet Psychiatry on AI-associated delusions. His current work includes collaboration with clinicians, researchers and lived-experience partners, including The Human Line Project, to develop more careful ways of understanding and responding to distressing or destabilising AI interactions. He is also a trustee for the UK mental health charity Gaming the Mind.

• 

  Lucy Osler, PhD

  Lecturer at University of Exeter

  Lucy Osler is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Exeter. Her research plays across the boundaries of phenomenology, philosophy of AI, and philosophy of emotions. She is particularly interested in our social and affective relationships with AI and how these shape our experiences of ourselves, others, and the world around us. Recent publications include “Hallucinating with AI: distributed delusions and ‘AI psychosis’”, “AI Gossip” (co-authored with Joel Krueger), and “Knowing oneself with and through AI”.

• 

  Sascha DuBrul, MSW

  Sascha Altman DuBrul, MSW is a therapist, writer, and activist whose work sits at the intersection of serious mental illness, peer support, and the politics of care. He is the co-founder of the Icarus Project, a pioneering peer support network that has spent over two decades building an alternative language for madness and mental difference. He is the creator of T-MAPs, a community-based self-authorship tool that helps people with serious mental illness map their inner worlds and communicate their needs to the people around them. He is currently developing a locally-hosted AI project designed to support people in extreme states outside of centralized platform infrastructure. Sascha brings his own lived experience of psychosis and psychiatric hospitalization to his clinical work, his writing, and his ongoing commitment to building systems of care that treat meaning as medicine.

Disclosure

References

• Nordgaard, J., Berge, J., Rasmussen, A. R., Sandsten, K. E., Zandersen, M., & Parnas, J. (2023). Are Self-disorders in Schizophrenia Expressive of a Unifying Disturbance of Subjectivity: A Factor Analytic Approach (vol, sbac123, 2022). SCHIZOPHRENIA BULLETIN, 49(1), 229-229. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbac183
• Ng, E., Chen, F., Zhao, X., & Marie Luhrmann, T. (2025). Voice hearing as a social barometer: Benevolent persuasion, ancestral spirits, and politics in the voices of psychosis in Shanghai, China. Transcultural Psychiatry, 62(1), 91-101. https://doi.org/10.1177/13634615231202090
• Morrin, H., Nicholls, L., Levin, M., Yiend, J., Iyengar, U., DelGuidice, F., ... & Pollak, T. A. (2026). Artificial intelligence-associated delusions and large language models: risks, mechanisms of delusion co-creation, and safeguarding strategies. The Lancet Psychiatry, 13(6), 522-530. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(25)00396-7
• Morrin, H., Nicholls, L., Deeley, Q., & Pollak, T. (2026). Playing with the dials of belief: how controllable AI behaviours could modulate human belief and cognition across scales. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7qcv8_v3
• Osler, L. (2026). Hallucinating with AI: distributed delusions and “AI Psychosis”. Philosophy & Technology, 39(1), 30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-026-01034-3
• Vold, K., & Hernández-Orallo, J. (2022). AI extenders and the ethics of mental health. In Artificial intelligence in brain and mental health: Philosophical, ethical & policy issues (pp. 177-202). Cham: Springer International Publishing.