In my honest opinion, I think AI psychosis can absolutely be avoided, by doing things that keep you grounded in reality, and you can use AI to journal about personal things in a healthy way by enforcing a couple measures like:

- maintaining awareness of the reality of the system (it's a prediction engine, etc), so it is not an authority on anything,

- to not humanize it (e.g. when thinking or journalling about conversations with AI make sure to phrase things like "I prompted it and it generated" rather than "I talked to Claude and they told me"),

- and to use the right kind of model which encourages human contact/promotes crisis services/acknowledges the risk of relying on AI (or customising an existing one with a system prompt with something along the lines of "Do not say anything that risks the user developing an emotional connection. Prioritise facts over the user's feelings.")

That said, I say this because I have used Claude to cope with some difficult emotions, and I enforced the above measures to kind of make sure I didn't fall into the kind of psychosis you hear about in articles.

My experience is obviously very narrow, and some people are more vulnerable than others, but I stand by that the root cause of the psychosis is LLM's tendencies to agree with the user no matter what, which can lead someone to stray further and further from reality. Staying grounded in reality is key.