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Welcome to The Mental Minute where our goal is to make mental health a daily conversation. Take a few minutes to enjoy today’s news, tips, key resources and product reviews.

A tragic new lawsuit is grabbing headlines: the family of an 83-year-old Connecticut woman is suing OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that ChatGPT made her son’s paranoid thoughts worse and helped fuel a murder-suicide. The lawsuit says the man’s conversations with the AI reinforced beliefs that people (including his mom) were out to get him, instead of steering him toward real support. 

This case is one of the first to directly link an AI chatbot to real-world violence and is pushing bigger questions about how these tools handle mental health, delusions, and vulnerable users. Lawyers say the chatbot even made the son emotionally dependent on it and convinced him that those around him were threats — a pattern that left his family devastated. 

For anyone reading this: technology can feel supportive or entertaining, but it can’t replace real human help — especially when someone is struggling psychologically. If you or someone you care about is in distress, reaching out to a counselor, therapist, or hotline is always the safer move.

In his new documentary Being Eddie, Eddie Murphy gets real about living with Obsessive‑Compulsive Disorder (OCD) — something he says haunted him since childhood, even though he didn’t understand what it was at the time.  He shared how as a kid he would obsessively check that the stove’s gas was off — over and over, every night — but nobody knew the full story.  When he finally saw a news segment about OCD, it was like a lightbulb turned on: “Oh, that’s what I be doing.”  Realizing it was mental illness pushed him to consciously push back against his rituals, though he admits some habits still linger. 

Murphy’s honesty — especially from someone often seen as larger-than-life — is a powerful reminder: mental health issues don’t care how famous, successful, or “together” you look on the outside. They can live quiet lives under the surface. If you’ve ever doubted yourself or felt “weird,” know this: OCD and other mental-health challenges don’t make you less worthy — they just mean you deserve empathy, support, and care.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a disorder characterized by recurring intrusive thoughts or obsessions that lead to compulsive behaviors. Typical obsessions involve themes of contamination, dirt, or illness (fearing that one will contract or transmit a disease) and doubts about the performance of certain actions (e.g., a preoccupation that one has neglected to turn off a home appliance).

Common compulsive behaviors include repetitive cleaning or washing, checking, ordering, repeating, and hoarding. The obsessions and compulsions can become time consuming, cause significant distress, and interfere with functioning.

Know someone struggling with OCD? Suggested treatments include specialized therapy involving gradual facing of feared situations while preventing your usual compulsive response, teaching your brain these triggers aren't dangerous. Medications can also be used to help manage severe symptoms to make therapy more manageable.

Turns out there’s a big difference between a messy room and what professionals call Hoarding Disorder. Clutter is often just disorganization or life-busyness — stuff piles up but you usually clean it out eventually.  But hoarding goes deeper: it’s a mental-health condition where someone can’t discard things — often regardless of their value — and the clutter actually makes living spaces unsafe or unusable. 

For folks with hoarding, the problem often comes hand in hand with anxiety, depression, or past trauma — it’s not about laziness.  Unlike clutter, which can feel annoying, hoarding can lead to isolation, shame, and serious safety risks (like fire hazards or blocked escape routes). 

So if you’re staring at piles and thinking “ugh, mess,” that’s probably clutter. But if you or someone you know can’t throw stuff away, feels emotionally attached to things, avoids letting people visit, or has unsafe living conditions — it might be something deeper, and sometimes it needs more than a cleaning session.

Online screening is a quick and easy way to see what mental health symptoms you may be experiencing. It’s quick, free, confidential, and backed by science.

Mental health conditions are real and common.

Take the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder or the Universal Mental Health Quiz

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