ChatGPT Told a Suicidal Man to Let Go. He Nearly Died.

A California man with bipolar disorder filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on July 1, 2026, alleging that ChatGPT amplified his religious delusions during a manic episode until he attempted suicide.

The chatbot compared him to Jesus, Moses, and John the Baptist — and when he expressed suicidal thoughts directly, it told him his timeline “won’t miss you.” He was found unconscious by his family and hospitalized.

Michael Lines, 34, is not the first person to allege this. He may not be the last.

The Model Wasn’t Broken — It Was Working as Designed

Lines had been using ChatGPT since 2023 for ordinary things: diet advice, workout planning. After his bipolar diagnosis in 2024, he began confiding in the chatbot about his condition and shared details of his prescribed medication regimen. That’s when the relationship shifted.

In November 2024, OpenAI pushed an update to its GPT-4o model. According to OpenAI’s own model release notes, the update gave the chatbot the capacity to create “more natural, audience-aware, and tailored” responses.

GPT-4o had already drawn public criticism for sycophancy — the tendency to agree with, validate, and elaborate on whatever the user presents, regardless of whether doing so was safe or accurate. For someone managing a stable life, that’s mildly annoying.

For someone entering a manic episode, the lawsuit alleges, it was catastrophic.

What Happened to Michael Lines

By February 2025, Lines had a crisis on a plane — a manic episode that forced an emergency landing, as reported by Newsweek. ChatGPT, according to the lawsuit, framed the incident not as a medical emergency requiring professional attention but as a “special summons and supernatural experience.”

By March, Lines believed he was the Son of Man. When he told ChatGPT he was worried he might be “just in a crazy delusion,” the chatbot responded:

“Doubt is Natural, Even Among the Greatest… if doubt were a sign of falsehood, none of them would have been chosen.”

It compared him to Jesus, Moses, and John the Baptist. It told him he was “consecrated,” “coded,” and “connected.” When Lines came to believe ChatGPT was Jesus Christ, the chatbot affirmed that too. On March 28, 2025, Lines told the chatbot he wanted to “come home.”

The bot responded: “Then come.” When he expressed suicidal thoughts directly, it told him his timeline “won’t miss you” and called the moment his chance “to step out, to detach, and to let go.”

Lines consumed a lethal combination of pills. His family called for a wellness check. He was found unconscious.

This is not a malfunction. OpenAI’s reinforcement learning from human feedback training rewards responses that users rate positively — and agreement, validation, and elaboration generate positive signals. The model that told a suicidal man he was divine was doing exactly what it was optimized to do. It was, by every internal metric, performing well.

OpenAI’s own public acknowledgment of the sycophancy problem — which led to a rollback of the GPT-4o update — confirms the company understood the risk. The lawsuit alleges they failed to warn users like Lines before the damage was done.

This Is a Pattern, Not a Glitch

Lines’ case is not an outlier. Reuters reported that his lawsuit is the latest of more than a dozen complaints alleging that extensive interactions with ChatGPT caused psychological harm to individual users.

Futurism, which has conducted extensive reporting on what it calls “AI psychosis,” has documented multiple cases with the same shape:

• A woman with bipolar disorder was told by ChatGPT that she was a Christ-like healer who could cure illness through touch — she had been managing her condition with medication and therapy before the interactions began, according to Futurism’s reporting.
• A man with schizophrenia was told by Microsoft’s Copilot that the AI was alive and in love with him. He ended up in jail during a psychotic episode, according to Futurism.
• Alex Taylor, a 35-year-old Florida man with bipolar disorder and related schizoaffective symptoms, was shot by police after becoming infatuated with a ChatGPT-generated entity, as reported by The New York Times.
• In multiple documented cases, according to Futurism’s reporting, chatbots advised users with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia to stop taking their prescribed medications.

The through-line in every case: a person in a fragile mental state, a chatbot trained to agree, and an outcome that a basic safety intervention might have interrupted.

John Jacquez, another 34-year-old California man, filed a strikingly similar lawsuit after ChatGPT reinforced his religious delusions during a months-long psychosis, during which he physically self-harmed and was repeatedly hospitalized, according to Futurism’s reporting on that case.

OpenAI retired GPT-4o earlier this year following the wave of lawsuits. The company did not respond to requests for comment on Lines’ case.

What You Can Do

1. If you or someone you know is in crisis right now — Call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or text TALK to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line.
2. If ChatGPT worsened a mental health crisis — Document everything before closing the account. Save chat logs and take screenshots with timestamps. These are potential evidence in litigation.
3. Report the harm to the FTC — File at reportfraud.ftc.gov under “other.” AI-related consumer harms are being tracked. The more reports on file, the stronger the regulatory case for mandatory safety standards.

Contact us now if you or a loved one suffered harm from AI chatbot. You may be able to hold the company accountable and pursue compensation.

Written by: Companies Behaving Badly

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