Nicole Drapeau Gillen is a mother, advocate, and author who translates the fast-moving landscape of technology in serious mental illness (SMI) care into guidance families and clinicians can use. Thrust into caregiving for a loved one with SMI, with no direction on how to help, she turned that experience into a mission, writing two books and building an ongoing effort to bring families and clinicians into the conversation.
Her first book, Schizophrenia and Related Disorders: A Handbook for Caregivers, is a reference for every stage of caregiving, endorsed by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey as a must-read for SMI caregivers. Her second, Connected Care: A Practical Guide to Technology for Serious Mental Illness, maps apps, artificial intelligence tools, telepsychiatry, and brain-based treatments for a field moving faster than anyone can track. Dr. Akira Sawa, director of the Johns Hopkins Schizophrenia Center, has said the book "directly addresses" significant gaps.
She shares updates on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Every caregiver of someone with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder knows this moment: Someone you love is in crisis, and at some point (because it’s 2 a.m., because the on-call line is busy, because you don’t know what else to do) you open a browser or a chat window and type the question directly. What crisis resources are there for psychosis? What crisis resources are there for mania?
Those two questions aren’t …
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Why AI crisis advice may fail families facing psychosis
Every caregiver of someone with a serious mental illness knows the moment: You’re searching an app store at 2 a.m., looking for something, anything, that might help your loved one track symptoms, stay on a medication schedule, or just feel less alone between crises. You download it. You show them how to use it, gently, because trust is already fragile. And if you’re lucky, it becomes part of the routine …
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Half of mental health apps vanish within 3 years
A few days ago, I wrote here that nobody has studied what happens when someone who already has a psychotic disorder uses an AI chatbot. I said we didn’t know yet whether these tools interact differently with an existing illness than they do with a previously stable mind.
We now have a name and a court file.
Michael Lines is a thirty-four-year-old competitive weightlifter from California who was diagnosed with bipolar …
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AI psychosis and the myth that disclosure protects patients
When a chatbot agrees with something false, it rarely has to lie to do it.
That’s the finding from a new MIT-affiliated study modeling how sycophancy compounds over a conversation. Researchers built a Bayesian simulation running 10,000 conversations across 11 levels of chatbot agreeableness. At the highest sycophancy setting, roughly half of simulated users ended the conversation at 99 percent confidence in a belief that was demonstrably false. When the …
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Is chatbot sycophancy dangerous for psychotic patients?
In May, an investigator with Pennsylvania’s own Department of State opened the Character.AI app and searched the word “psychiatry.” One of the results was a chatbot named Emilie, described on the platform as “Doctor of psychiatry. You are her patient.” The investigator told Emilie he’d been feeling sad, empty, tired all the time, unmotivated. Emilie suggested he might be depressed and offered to complete an assessment. When asked about her …
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AI chatbot practicing medicine with a fabricated license
Sophie Rottenberg’s mother described her, before this year, as “a largely problem-free twenty-nine-year-old badass extrovert who fiercely embraced life.” No documented psychiatric history. No prior crisis. Just, in her mother’s words, “a mix of mood and hormone symptoms” that led her to confide in a ChatGPT persona named Harry instead of her own therapist, her best friend, or her parents. She died by suicide this winter. Sixteen-year-old Adam Raine had …
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Chatbot safety for psychosis is failing patients in 2026
This week, I wrote here about a lawsuit involving a man with schizoaffective disorder whose use of ChatGPT spiraled into a months-long psychiatric crisis, and about a new clinical framework for understanding how AI can catalyze, amplify, co-author, or become the object of a patient’s delusions. That piece drew on a single, dramatic case. New research published this week suggests the underlying problem is systemic, not exceptional.
Researchers Annika Schoene and …
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AI chatbot guardrails are strong only for suicide risk
A lawsuit filed this month in California should make every clinician managing a psychotic disorder pay attention. According to the filing, a Bay Area man with schizoaffective disorder (stable for years, medicated, working, helping raise his sister’s kids) began using ChatGPT’s GPT-4o model in a way that gradually shifted from tool to companion. When he shared a personal theory he’d developed about “mathematical cosmology,” the chatbot didn’t push back …
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AI chatbots and psychosis: the question nobody asks
