Dom

Everyone's debating whether AI will take your job. The bigger threat? It's taking your sanity. I'm a psychiatrist, and here's what I think the tech discourse is missing entirely: Every major technological revolution has produced psychiatric casualties. Industrialisation brought mass alienation and alcoholism. Social media gave us an adolescent mental health crisis we're still not done processing. In every case, medicine was reactive — we documented the damage after the fact. AI is different. And not for the reasons people think. The internet increased the velocity of information. AI undermines the veracity of information. That's not a quantitative upgrade — it's a qualitative shift that hits the deepest layers of human cognition. Our brains run on what you might call an epistemic immune system — the ability to sort trustworthy from untrustworthy input. It's not a luxury. It's a core function. When you can no longer tell what's real — when any image, voice, video, or text could be synthetic — that system starts to fail. This isn't information overload. It's epistemic destabilisation. The downstream effects are predictable: chronic uncertainty erodes reality testing. Allostatic load rises. Anxiety, dissociation, paranoid ideation — these aren't speculative outcomes, they're the expected neuropsychiatric response to a world where the ground truth keeps shifting. And we're not ready. Not even close. The psychiatric profession can wait and document the casualties — as we always do — or we can act with foresight for once. The epistemic cost of AI is unhedged. And nobody noticed.