How to use AI for information without letting it take the place of real mental health care
AI tools are useful for many things. I use them to organize information and to think through a problem. But just like social media and the internet in general, AI can be used in ways that support our mental health and in ways that work against it. More people are turning to chatbots when they feel anxious, low or stuck, and it makes perfect sense that they would. A chatbot is available at 2 a.m., never gets tired of our questions, and costs nothing. These are the things that make AI easy to use and easy to misuse.
An AI model can approximate mental health advice. It can describe a CBT skill accurately and suggest reasonable next steps. What it cannot do is know you. It doesn’t know your history, the look on your face, what you left out, or what has changed since last week. It only knows what you type into the chat box. In my experience, much of what helps in therapy comes from the relationship itself and from what a client finds words for over time. Feeling understood and seen by another person is not a side benefit of good mental health care, but what defines it.
Internet technology and AI also reinforce “checking” behaviors, which are attempts to increase certainty that end up increasing anxiety. Before AI, we could google our symptoms, read every article and scrutinize every image to relieve our health anxiety. Now an AI chatbot will do this for us and hand us a tidy response that can confirm our fears, even when it adds that it is not a doctor. Or we check to seek reassurance that we are “OK.” Each check brings a moment of relief, and then the doubt comes back and the urge to check comes with it. AI is very well suited to this pattern. You can ask the same question ten different ways and get a calm, reasonable answer every time. And then you ask again. It is an endless cycle.
AI tools are built on machine learning models trained on enormous amounts of text. They are good at finding, summarizing and explaining information. They are not good at deciding what is true about your life, and they tend to agree with whoever is asking. I find it helpful to use AI like an encyclopedia or a librarian, rather than an oracle or a scribe. Ask it to explain what exposure therapy is, to summarize the research on sleep and mood, or to point you toward a therapist directory. Do not ask it to tell you what your feelings mean, whether your partner is a narcissist, or whether you should leave your job. And do not hand it the work of writing your thoughts for you. Putting your experience into your own words is part of how you come to understand it.
If you are struggling with depression, anxiety, insomnia or a life transition, look for resources and treatments that have been developed and tested by and for human beings. You can find additional resources on our site. If you are in crisis, in the US you can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.