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Excellent question. I guess I, too,, suffered ICU psychosis though (when I regained my senses) I chalked it up to the drugs they used to keep me in an induced coma for 11 days. My eyes would open and my brain would take in info to formulate the delusions that I reacted to after they woke me up and I stayed in ICU another 17 days. But then I continued to have much milder symptoms, ie, sudden fearfulness, for a number of weeks. In short, I think you may be on to something. I would have sworn quite credibly in a stack of Bibles that
My care providers were trying to kill me

In 2015 I was in the ICU for 21 days, 16 days on mechanical ventilation. It was an E. coli blood sepsis with multiple organ failure: cardiac arrest, airway collapse, renal failure. They kept bringing me back.

I remember thinking (if it can be called "thinking") in a panic, "They're hurting you! They're killing you! FIGHT BACK!"

I remember trying to spit at, and head-butt, the respiratory therapist.

I remember grabbing for a nurse's nitrile-blue fingers and trying to bend them backwards and break them.

I remember thinking (not quite sure how to explain this) that they were trying to "fold me shut" like slamming a book shut, when they were just trying to change my position in the bed.

I remember a man dressed in blue looming menacingly over my face, and me (unable to move) wishing I had a knife under my pillow so I could stab him before he could fling me, naked, over his shoulder and carry me to a heliport...

Much later, when I was in my right mind, I tried to apologize to some of these good people, and they just laughed and brushed it off. "ICU paranoia. We see it all the time."

I learned something very important, I think, about the unreliability of the human mind in the throes of bacterial toxins, abnormal metabolites, and powerful therapeutic drugs.