We Need to Know More About How AI is Affecting Mental Health
We Need to Know More About How AI is Affecting Mental Health
https://www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-know-more-about-how-ai-is-affecting-mental-health
Publish Date: 2026-06-08 09:45:00
Source Domain: www.techpolicy.press
Chris Mills Rodrigo is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.
In the three years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT and the emergence of similar technologies as ubiquitous in modern society, a handful of alarming stories about mental health crises linked with large language model-powered chatbots have broken through otherwise positive coverage of artificial intelligence.
The parents of a 16-year-old from California sued OpenAI in the fall of 2025 alleging that ChatGPT encouraged him to take his own life. A 76-year-old retiree never made it home from a New York City trip to ‘visit’ an AI persona developed by Meta. A father of three became convinced he had discovered a major threat to Canadian national security.
Despite these examples of delusions or even psychosis connected to chatbot use, there is still a lot the public, mental health practitioners, and policymakers don’t know about the impacts of artificial intelligence use on the human psyche.
This knowledge gap — created in no small part by the intentional opacity of the big technology companies in the space — poses serious issues for mental health, treatment, and the regulation of AI tools that are being widely adopted.
What we know about AI mental health use
The use of AI-powered chatbots has exploded in the last few years, with a recent survey finding a slim majority of Americans (52 percent) using them weekly.
OpenAI reports having over 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, Google claims Gemini has over 750 million active users, and estimates put Anthropic’s Claude users between 18 and 30 million.
Some of the most common uses of LLMs include entertainment and help writing emails — 69 percent and 51 percent of respondents to one survey of adults in the United States attempting to provide some clarity of AI use, respectively — and for mental health help.
It can be difficult to know what kind of people turn to chatbots for advice that might traditionally be thought of as in the remit of therapists. The survey…
