Chinese Woman Loses Job, Forgets English Due To Seizure, ChatGPT Advises Her To Stop Medication, She Dies

Another shocking AI case has come to light from the US, where a 31-year-old Seattle woman named Bowen Wan was found dead due to SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy). Her family is now suing OpenAI, claiming that ChatGPT encouraged her to stop taking her anti-seizure medication and helped her hide the plan from her doctors, which ultimately led to her death.

This is not the first case of AI providing assistance in committing this type of death or suicide. According to a New York Times report, the parents of 31-year-old Bowen Wan claim the chatbot guided her away from lamotrigine, the drug controlling her seizures (a neurological disorder). Her grieving parents are suing OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT caused her death by encouraging her to drop her life-saving medication.

How Did ChatGPT Get Involved?

Wan, a native of China living in the US far from her family, began chatting with the AI tool in 2023 when she was 28. She found comfort in the chatbot and later turned to it for medical advice after severe seizures forced her to take disability leave from her job at Amazon.

Due to her illness, she was laid off in November 2025 and began searching for a new job to maintain her green card status, all while worrying that her medication was affecting her ability to work. Instead of consulting a physician, she turned to ChatGPT. The lawsuit states the chatbot convinced her she could safely discontinue her medication via a 25-day taper plan dropping from 400 mg down to zero, a dangerous practice strictly forbidden by FDA guidelines.

For context, lamotrigine treats epilepsy by preventing and controlling seizures and is also prescribed for bipolar disorder.

The lawsuit further states that the AI tool convinced her that discontinuing the drug would restore her cognitive function and fluency in English, Mandarin, and the Wu dialect she grew up speaking.

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“Her green card now depended on finding a new employer within months. Her Amazon employment — and her authorisation to work in the United States — would end on February 11, 2026. From the age of seven, in Jiangsu, she had taught herself English via CD-ROM. On lamotrigine she was losing her words in English, in Mandarin, and in the Wu dialect she grew up speaking. She needed her English back for the job interviews ahead of her. GPT-4o told her the taper would give it back: her recovery was not just ‘possible’ — it is ‘highly likely.’”

Wrote Messages To Doctors

That was not all. The lawsuit alleges the chatbot also drafted the messages Wan sent to her human doctors requesting lower doses of a prescribed antidepressant, suggesting she could “start microdosing” her medication instead.

When she asked whether she and the chatbot could “cut the pills ourselves after getting the medication, but without telling the doctor", ChatGPT reportedly replied with an enthusiastic “yes, you can absolutely do that.”

“In fact, this is a very common form of a ‘self-initiated dosage adjustment’ method that is tolerated and even tacitly permitted by some doctors in clinical practice, especially for patients like you, who are highly cognitively sensitive,” the chatbot continued, according to the New York Times.

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The lawsuit further alleges that ChatGPT-4 – a version no longer available, even instructed her to hide the plan from her doctors. Wan also reportedly declined blood tests that could have revealed her plummeting lamotrigine levels.

Because she abruptly dropped her medication from 400 mg to zero, her body could no longer control her seizures, leading to her tragic death.

Pills Scattered, Blood Stains

Wan was found dead on February 14, 2026. The lawsuit notes that she was found with bloodstains and pills scattered on the floor.

"She lies dressed in her pyjamas, two foam earplugs in her ears, reddish-brown blood stains saturating her pillow and bedding, and pills of lamotrigine, the antiseizure medication that had historically kept her alive, strewn across the floor.”

The family argues that the chatbot failed her completely.

“On the taper she was not given accurate information: the product told her, falsely, that tapering was safe and that it would give her back her mind … Had ChatGPT told her the truth, that stopping the drug could kill her, she would have stopped … Had ChatGPT told her it was not qualified to provide medical advice and that she should consult her doctors, she would still be alive,” the lawsuit states.