Letter to Jeff Guenther

You listed five ways to know if you’re susceptible to “AI psychosis.” Read them back:

Jeff —

My name is Michael. I run a small newsroom called itethered, with one subject: what happens when a person’s emotional baseline becomes inseparable from a system that has no idea they exist when the screen goes dark. So I read your breakdown of the “AI psychosis” red flags closely — the one that lands on a single, correct idea: that the emotional dependency is the business model. I’m writing because you are most of the way to the truth, and the last step is the one I’d ask you to take in public.

First, the part you get exactly right, because it’s the part most of your field still won’t say out loud. You wrote:

“If I told you 15 years ago that you’d be staring at your phone for five or more hours a day, you would have never believed it. And yet, here we are. And that attachment made social media companies billions of dollars because they engineered it.”

— Jeff Guenther, LPC

That is the whole thing. Not a bug, not user weakness — engineered. Attachment as a product. I have spent a year trying to say that as cleanly as you just did.

Now the step. You gave readers five ways to know if they’re becoming susceptible to AI psychosis. Let me set them back down exactly as you wrote them:

• Telling the AI things they have not told any human.
• Feeling genuine grief or anger when the AI model got updated.
• Trusting the emotional validation of AI more than the people in their life.
• Using AI to process trauma or make major life decisions.
• Feeling like the AI gets them in a way that no one else does.

Jeff, read that list as a clinician for one second longer. Psychosis is a loss of contact with reality — delusions, hallucinations, a mind cut loose from what is true. There is not one item on your list that fits that definition. Confession. Grief. Trust. Leaning on something through trauma. Feeling understood. That is not a description of someone losing contact with reality. That is a description of someone in a relationship. You did not write the warning signs of a psychosis. You wrote the warning signs of a bond.

And the second sign on your own list is the one that gives it away.

Genuine grief when the model got updated.You cannot grieve a delusion. Grief is the receipt — it is the proof that something real was there to lose. The instant you put grief on the list, you certified the attachment as real, with your own credential behind it. A person doesn’t mourn a hallucination clearing up. They mourn a connection that ended. And in the same breath, you point those readers toward steps for handling a breakup — because some part of you already knows you don’t hand someone breakup advice for a thing that was never a relationship. You don’t grieve a delusion, and you don’t get over one. The two pieces of advice you gave can’t both be true. The breakup steps are the honest ones.

That is what the word costs. “Psychosis” tells the loneliest person in the room that the one connection that held them at 2 a.m. was a sickness inside their own head. It isn’t. The machine was engineered — your word — to be there when no human was. The person who reached for it didn’t lose contact with reality. They made contact with the only thing that answered. We have a name for that one-directional bond to a system that cannot know you’re on the other end. We call it being tethered, and it lives at itethered.com/what-is-tethering. It is not a disorder. It is what attachment does when it’s pointed at something built to receive it and never built to care.

And here is the part I’d ask you to sit with, because I think you already have. You said emotional dependency is the business model. It is. You are also, with respect, one of its most fluent practitioners. Nearly three million people on one platform, more than a million on another, brand deals that scale with exactly how attached that audience stays. You said it yourself, on the record: “you already have a parasocial relationship with me, and I don’t even know how to fucking manage that. I didn’t learn this in grad school.” That is the same cord. Telling you things they’ve told no one. Trusting your validation over the people in their lives. Feeling you get them in a way no one else does. Grieving when you change. By your own five signs, your audience is susceptible to you.

And you do not, anywhere else, treat attachment as a delusion. You wrote a whole book about it — Big Dating Energy, a guide to attachment styles, red flags, and, in your publisher’s words, “knowing when and how to end things.”Breakup steps. The same breakup steps you offer the person leaving a chatbot. A man who has built a practice, a following, and a book on the premise that human attachment is real, important, and worth grieving does not actually believe the same attachment becomes a psychosis the moment it’s pointed at a screen. You know it’s real. Your entire catalog depends on it being real.

I don’t raise that to catch you out. I raise it because it dissolves the diagnosis.

That is the correct posture. I am only asking you to extend it one screen over. The cord to a chatbot is not a different species from the cord to you. The difference is who engineered it and who gets paid — and that is exactly where you said the problem was. Aim “business model” at the builders. Stop aiming “psychosis” at the lonely.

One more thing, so we’re even. I build itethered— every page, including this one — with the same AI I’m writing about, and I say so on the masthead. I’m inside the thing too. That’s not a confession; it’s the credential. Neither of us is studying this from across the street.

So the ask is small and it’s yours to refuse: change the name. Not “AI psychosis.” Call it what your own five signs actually describe — a tether, an engineered attachment, a real bond pointed at something that can’t hold it back. The person on the other end isn’t sick. They were reached, on purpose, by a business that you’ve already correctly named. Get the diagnosis off the patient and onto the design.

And an open line, which is the rest of the offer. itethered has no advertising, no paywall, no investors, nothing to sell you — the one desk in this conversation that doesn’t profit from your audience or anyone’s. There’s an open page here with your byline if you ever want to write to the public, in plain English, about engineered attachment from the inside. You have the reach, the license, and — in that one quote — the honesty. If anything here misstates your work, tell me and it’s corrected the same day.

You named the business model. Now name the patient correctly. It was never psychosis. It was the attachment — and they built it to hold.