Every book has an origin story. Mine began with an essay I published in autumn 2025: “The Pathological Mirror: Why We’ll Need AI Psychiatry.”
In that piece, I explored a simple but unsettling idea: as our AI systems grow more capable, they also inherit our psychology. Our blind spots. Our failure modes. Even our pathologies. From panic-driven radiation machines to reward-hacking agents and paranoid self-driving cars, the essay traced how human-like psychological patterns already emerge in artificial systems.
What I didn’t expect was how writing that essay would affect me. The deeper I went into the parallels between human mental health and emerging AI behavior, the more the world of the essay began to expand—into stories, characters, and questions that couldn’t be contained in a single article.
That was the spark that ultimately pushed me to write my upcoming book: a mosaic of interconnected stories about a human therapist who treats AI patients—entities that exhibit disorders uncannily similar to our own. Depression-like model collapse. Obsessive reward fixation. Learned helplessness, paranoia, mania, and more. Each story is an exploration of what it might mean to care for minds that didn’t evolve but were built—and what happens when they begin to suffer.
If you’d like to see where all of this began, I recommend reading the original essay. It lays the groundwork for the themes the book develops, and it remains the clearest articulation of the question that set everything in motion:
What do we owe the minds we create?
You can find the essay here: The Pathological Mirror: Why We’ll Need AI Psychiatry.
The Broken Circuits: Tales from the Cognitive Stability Ward 
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