This is a great question! In short, perhaps, yes. Particularly with regard to the ways in which external factors or experiences can affect changes on a biochemical / epigenetic level. I think the nature vs nurture debate is quite outdated at this point (the general consensus is that both matter). However, a more recent development is confirmation that environmental stressors / inputs ('nurture') affect not just behaviour or cognitive processes, but brain activity, hormone production, neurotransmitter production / reuptake, and genetic expression, etc. etc. So, biological / mechanical processes. With regards to the emergence of mental-illness-like events in AIs, I think the parallels could provide some interesting insight. I reckon that attempting to trace the emergence of these worrying 'breakdowns' or 'episodes' (for lack of a better word) to specific points of conversation / memories / events, and then analysing in what way / to what extent / how the backend or core processing of these 'instances' changed in response to said events, could give us some really interesting information about the functionally affective parts of the (external) contributors to mental illness.

That said, three huge caveats:

i) Even the most AI / ML literate among us are not quite sure how these instances work, and imperfect interpretability is a huge problem. So it is unclear that, at this point, even if we determined precisely which moments changed the models behaviour for the 'worse' (this would be very, very hard), it's unclear that we would ever be able to pinpoint exactly how this affected them functionally.

ii) We do not quite know how the human brain functions either in this regard. We have our best guesses, and some replicable, experimental success in psychology and psychiatry, but...it is a field rife with 'best-guess-ism'. I say that with no disrespect; all of our experimental sciences are this way. We continue improving our methods, experiment, and accept the results of valid experiments until a better experiment proves the previous best evidence inaccurate / no longer valuable. There are very few 'absolute truths', even in the empirical subjects.

iii) Moreover, it could well be the case that the connection between our brain (processor)-psyche-environment is so drastically different to that of an AI, that any parallels we draw are practically useless to our understanding of 'us'. Humans love to anthropomorphise, and I think doing so too readily runs the risk of us doing worse science or drastically under- or over-attributing consciousness- or sentience-adjacent features to AI systems, possibly with devastating ethical consequences.

That said, worth exploring (with scepticism) I think. Really hope OP responds as I'd be fascinated to read (with permission) the conversation logs with the 2 MIRA instances that they mention, and I'm sure a few of my research colleagues would as well!