Every Way In: A Taxonomy of AI-Induced Psychosis by Etiological Mechanism

Psychiatry has established multiple distinct etiological pathways to psychosis, each with itsown causal mechanism, clinical presentation, and intervention protocol. Substance-inducedpsychosis follows ingestion of a specific agent. Environmentally-induced psychosis followssustained exposure to chronic stressors. Shared psychotic disorder follows close contact witha delusional index case. Sleep deprivation psychosis follows disruption of circadianregulation. Brief reactive psychosis follows acute traumatic events. Sensory-inducedpsychosis follows sustained perceptual disruption. Social isolation psychosis followsprolonged deprivation of human contact. Iatrogenic psychosis follows medical or therapeuticintervention gone wrong. This paper demonstrates that artificial intelligence systems havereplicated, are currently replicating, or are positioned to replicate every one of theseestablished pathways. Conversational AI systems function as the ingested substance.Surveillance infrastructure functions as the environmental stressor. AI-generated delusionalcontent propagates through online communities following the shared psychosis model. AIengagement patterns produce the sleep deprivation. AI-integrated institutional failuresproduce the acute trauma. Augmented and virtual reality AI systems produce the sensorydisruption. AI companions produce the social isolation wearing the mask of connection.AI-assisted clinical tools produce the iatrogenic harm. The taxonomy presented here is not aprediction about future risk. It is a mapping of current and documented phenomena ontoestablished psychiatric categories, demonstrating that AI has not introduced a single novelpathway to psychosis. It has instead found every existing door and walked through all ofthem simultaneously. The clinical, regulatory, and research implications of this convergenceare significant: a phenomenon currently studied as a single undifferentiated category("AI-induced psychosis") is in fact at least eight distinct phenomena requiring differentinterventions, different regulatory responses, and different research methodologies.