My OCD Was In Recovery. Then ChatGPT Arrived.

Yes it's my fault, yes I'm an idiot, yes you should learn from my mistake.

Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash

While news of ChatGPT-induced psychosis and mania circulates, I felt like it was a good time to finally write something I’ve been, frankly, too embarrassed to write for a long time because it makes me look like, as Trump might put it, a total and complete loser.

As many of you know, I have diagnosed OCD. I joke about it a lot, not because it’s a “fun little quirk,” as some might accuse me of portraying it, but because it has actually been pretty debilitating at different points in my life, especially my late teens. I wrote here about how I was diagnosed in high school, after lifelong obsessive compulsive behaviors took on the familiar form of germophobia. I wrote here about how health anxiety—not only about myself, but about my loved ones—is the most common form my OCD takes now (not to be confused with Munchausen’s—it’s quite the opposite, I don’t want anyone to be sick.) I also wrote about how Reddit seems to attract people with undiagnosed OCD, and why it’s a bad place for OCD sufferers to go for help. More recently, I wrote about how OCD can take the form of doomerism, about COVID, nuclear war, or climate change.

When I wrote most of those things, I considered myself “in recovery,” or at least close to it, after working closely with a psychologist trained in ERP, or exposure response prevention therapy, where I exposed myself to my triggers (or allowed them to show up) and resisted the urge to make them go away, via researching, asking for reassurance, or rumination. OCD is never cured, even with medication and therapy, but you can eventually get to the point where it doesn’t upset you as much—where you might still get intrusive thoughts or irrational worries, but you won’t feel a strong urge to vanquish the uncomfortable feelings. Around this time, I confidently gave an interview with viral OCD therapist Jenna Overbaugh, where I described myself as “in the midst of recovery.”

But I got overly confident. Due to a change in our family’s insurance, I was no longer able to see my therapist, but because I was “in recovery,” I figured there was no need for another one. I would just continue doing what I was doing (or more realistically, not doing) and everything would be fine. Because I was so busy starting this Substack and getting super excited about it, I slowly forgot that I had OCD at all. One of the big obsessive behaviors that my therapist urged me to stop doing was Googling various medical conditions that worried me. At one point, she said that if I needed to, I could use WebMD or Mayo Clinic websites one time per disease, but not old Mumsnet threads or medical literature. I agreed that this was reasonable.

But I soon discovered that the fruitless hours that I used to spend Googling my fears could be replaced with just a few minutes on ChatGPT—it was like all of the medical literature in the world was in one location, easily summarized for someone without a medical school degree. ChatGPT also wouldn’t hedge to avoid liability, and might be more reassuring than Google. And most importantly, unlike my friends, family or even online strangers, ChatGPT would never get tired of reassuring me.

This, of course, turned out to be a major problem.