The conspiracy theorist Alex Jones blamed various claims he has made, including that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting was a hoax, on “psychosis”, according to a deposition given by the Infowars host as part of a Texas lawsuit.

Jones described his conspiracy thinking as a kind of mental disorder in the deposition, which was taken earlier this month for the lawsuit filed against him by the family of a six-year-old who was among 20 children and six adults killed in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

Jones said he “almost had like a form of psychosis back in the past where I basically thought everything was staged, even though I’m now learning a lot of times things aren’t staged”.

Jones blamed his mental state on “the trauma of the media and the corporations lying so much, then everything begins – you don’t trust anything anymore, kind of like a child whose parents lie to them over and over again, well, pretty soon they don’t know what reality is”.

The defamation suit was filed in Travis county, Texas, where Jones’ media company is based. In August, the judge presiding denied Jones’ request to dismiss the case.

Jones’ attorneys have defended his speech in court as “rhetorical hyperbole”, but denied it was defamation. In the deposition, Jones continued to voice conspiratorial suspicions about the Sandy Hook shooting.

“I still think that there was a man in the woods in camo … and just a lot of experts I’ve talked to, including retired FBI agents and other people and people high up in the Central Intelligence Agency, have told me that there is a cover-up in Sandy Hook,” Jones said.

A similar lawsuit has been filed in Connecticut. Several families in that suit say Jones’ comments have tormented them and subjected them to harassment and death threats by his followers, some of whom have accused them of being actors.

On Friday, a federal judge in West Virginia allowed another defamation case against Jones to proceed. The suit was filed on behalf of Brennan Gilmore, who captured footage of a fatal car attack on counterprotesters during a far-right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017.

In a statement, Andrew Mendrala, supervising attorney with the Civil Rights Clinic at Georgetown Law, said: “Victims of vile conspiracy theories should take comfort … today’s decision shows that the law will protect victims of baseless lies by holding people like Alex Jones accountable for the harm they cause.”