A Warning About a Trendy New Mental Health Therapy
AI has become the Swiss Army knife for modern life: it can plan your meals and write your emails, but when it comes to mental health therapy, there’s a big, flashing caution sign we all need to pay attention to: AI chatbots are not therapists—and relying on them like they are can actually be harmful. There’s a big uptick in people doing this. A few young people have even taken their own life and a chat bot helped them write a suicide note. Here are just some of the additional problems…
An AI chatbot can’t read the room or you. Good therapy depends on nuance. Human therapists notice things you don’t even realize you’re communicating—tone, body language, long pauses, subtle changes in your emotional state.
AI Chatbots make things up sometimes and they do so with confidence. They also have no ethical responsibility like a real therapist who is licensed, trained, and must follow confidentiality laws. With AI therapy you’re feeding your most intimate thoughts and feelings to a tech company and they then own that data. Your trauma doesn’t belong in a data center.
Perhaps the biggest problem of all is that AI doesn’t challenge you. A real therapist with push, question, reflect, and help you confront patterns you may not see, but AI usually sounds agreeable to keep you engaged in the platform. That’s great for customer service, but bad for psychological growth.
If you tell a therapist, “I want to hurt myself,” there are protocols. If you tell a chatbot, it might give you a motivational quote. Mental health struggles are rarely sovled with a list of tips. They require skilled listening, emotional safety, expertise, a personalized plan, and a trusted human relationship. AI can’t do that.
Bottom Line: AI chatbots are incredible technological tools—but they are not mental health professionals. They don’t replace trained therapists, they don’t understand human emotion the way humans do, and they’re missing the ethical, relational, and safety frameworks that make therapy, well… therapy.
In addition to hosting The Sean Show on B105.7, Sean and other human therapists are available at Evolve Therapy in Greenwood, IN.
