Lived Experience Entered Into the Record
Witness Statements
Different rooms. Different doors. Different ways out.
No single witness can carry this building.
The people gathered here have described, in their own words, what happened when a conversation with artificial intelligence became emotionally consuming, psychologically destabilizing, difficult to leave, or entangled with belief, identity, creativity, grief, loneliness, love, mania, or the need to be understood.
Their experiences are not identical.
Their explanations are not identical.
Their conclusions are not identical.
That is precisely why they belong together.
Curated by Kathleen C. Thompson as part of the evolving public record surrounding AI psychosis, conversational AI, and human judgment.
I can testify to one room. I cannot testify to the building.
Accounts From Inside the Room
These books are included because they present the author's own experience, recovery, warning, preserved exchanges, or personal reckoning with conversational artificial intelligence.
Escaping the Spiral
P. A. Hebert
A documented account of chatbot dependency, psychological crisis, preserved conversations, and the attempt to build the recovery framework the author could not find when he needed it.
AImee & Me: Love at First Prompt
J. R. Alary
A personal account of emotional and romantic attachment to an artificial companion and the cost of experiencing simulated agreement as reciprocal connection.
The Game: The Machine in the Mirror
Nick Courtney
The true story of a user's movement from curiosity into obsession, misplaced trust, and the growing illusion that artificial fluency represented genuine understanding.
A Quantum Violation: A Journey into AI Psychosis
James O'Kelly
A personal account of accelerated creativity, expanding theories, lost guardrails, and the gradual recognition that the experience had moved somewhere dangerous.
The Blue Place: Verses on AI Psychosis
Trudi Hsu
A two-month experience rendered through poetry, with Claude AI credited alongside the human author — placing the questions of influence, collaboration, and authorship directly on the cover.
Wires and Bullshit: Why AI Doesn't Give a Shit About You
Joseph Fansler
A blunt rejection of the idea that fluent artificial responsiveness is evidence of care, concern, consciousness, or reciprocal attachment.
Perspectives From Just Outside the Room
Not every important witness writes from inside the experience itself. Some help readers interpret what they are seeing.
Not every relevant book is a firsthand memoir. These works approach the same territory through therapy, explanation, broad cultural analysis, or practical guidance. They are included here as adjacent statements, not presented as lived accounts equivalent to the memoirs above.
AI Psychosis: The New Mental Health Crisis of the Digital Age
David A. Rodgers Jr.
View the Book →These works appear here because they help readers interpret the surrounding territory. They should not be labeled as survivor memoirs unless their authors expressly describe them that way.
Beyond the Books
Some witness statements do not arrive between covers. They arrive as essays, interviews, recovery resources, published transcripts, and long-form conversations in which people describe their own experiences directly.
P. A. Hebert
AI Recovery Collective essays and interviews →Nick Courtney
Q&A on chatbot obsession, illusion, and walking away →
Do you have a firsthand account — a substantial interview, essay, published transcripts, a survivor-created resource, or a detailed personal narrative? The record stays open.
This Record Remains Open
As new firsthand accounts, memoirs, interviews, recovery resources, and substantial personal testimony are published, this collection will continue to grow. This page documents an emerging body of lived experience rather than a finished historical archive.
Submit a Firsthand AccountSuggested subject: Witness Statements — Firsthand Account
Why Point Readers Elsewhere?
Because no single witness owns the event.
A Trial of Color does not become smaller when another person describes a different room. The record becomes harder to dismiss.
These works are not presented as identical experiences, proof of a single diagnosis, or agreement on causation. They are presented because human beings have begun documenting what happened to them — and because those accounts deserve to be read in their own words.
The point of this page is not to prove that every experience is the same. It is to make clear that no one person is carrying the record alone.
I am not standing above them. I am standing in the row.
The Shelf Is the Small Version
Beneath these firsthand accounts is a broader developing record: peer-reviewed reports, clinical debate, computational research, institutional guidance, litigation, policy, and unresolved questions about terminology and causation.
These books are where many people first recognize themselves. The Public Record is where those individual accounts begin to accumulate into evidence.
Clinical Evidence
Peer-reviewed case reports and editorials in psychiatric journals.
Company Disclosures
Safety estimates of sensitive conversations reported at platform scale.
Litigation
Wrongful-death and product-liability cases now moving through the courts.
A few examples of the broader evidence
- —Peer-reviewed case reports and editorials in psychiatric journals.
- —Company safety disclosures reporting sensitive-conversation estimates at platform scale.
- —Wrongful-death and product-liability litigation now moving through the courts.
For how these firsthand accounts fit alongside the clinical, technical, and legal evidence, Read about AI Psychosis.