The responses reveal profound worries about the accelerating use of AI chatbots in society and the risks of delusions or unhealthy dependencies that could develop when vulnerable people have relationships with machines mimicking human conversation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere have been several cases that have been made public about people becoming overly attached to chatbots,\u201d said Dr. Marketa Wills, CEO of the APA.\u00a0“As we\u2019ve seen these addictions, really, to AI and chatbots emerge, it makes us, as a field, be more cautious.”<\/p>\n
Olivia Uwamahoro, who co-chairs the ACA Working Group on AI, said hundreds of her fellow counselors weighed in on the survey because they see mental health clients using on chatbots more frequently.<\/p>\n
“There is this initial concern that is, if we become overly reliant on this very complex technology, what impact could it potentially have on our overall wellness?” she said.<\/p>\n
Psychiatrists and Counselors Pessimistic about AI<\/p>\n
According to results of the two surveys, half of the psychiatrists polled believe the use of AI in society will tend to decrease our collective mental health, while 24% forecast AI would increase mental health.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Counselors who responded were even more pessimistic, with 71% predicting AI would tend to decrease collective mental health and just 16% saying AI would be an overall mental health benefit.<\/p>\n
In each poll, respondents were also asked to consider whether AI platforms, specifically designed for mental health, might be used effectively to help address conditions like anxiety, depression, and addiction.<\/p>\n
On these questions, mental health professionals were more divided, with about two-thirds of counselors convinced AI \u201ctherapy bots\u201d would be ineffective.\u00a0 Psychiatrists were more evenly split, with a slim majority expressing optimism that AI therapy could be effective, especially for anxiety.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/AI-Therapy-Graphic.png\")
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AI Developers Push Back<\/p>\n
Though survey respondents were divided on the effectiveness of AI mental health apps, tech developers argue chatbots are already supporting people struggling with loneliness, mood, and sadness – even if the AI platforms stop short of full-blown therapy.\u00a0 They also say large language models have great potential to fill frustrating gaps in access to mental health services.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that AI has the potential to significantly improve population mental health in a way that we have not seen in our lifetime,\u201d said Jenna Glover, Chief Clinical Officer at Headspace, a company that engineered a chatbot called \u201cEbb,\u201d which bills itself as \u201can empathetic AI companion.\u201d<\/p>\n
Glover says \u201cEbb\u201d operates in the \u201cwellness\u201d space and stressed the chatbot does not conduct therapy.\u00a0 Rather, she says, it offers people a safe place to talk about daily mental health challenges while pointing users toward proven strategies to cope, including breathing exercises, journaling, and yoga.<\/p>\n
\u201cFinding out that there was this thing I could speak to, and it spoke back and made me think and dig into what I was feeling and why I was feeling that way without putting that on someone else?\u00a0 It was life changing,\u201d said Nicole Walker, a Headspace user who logs onto Ebb to calm her anxieties when her mind starts to race.\u00a0 Walker said she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder when she was younger.<\/p>\n
Scant Clinical Evidence<\/p>\n
Dr. John Torous, a Harvard psychiatrist and member of the American Psychiatric Association, said he believes AI chatbots could one day serve as effective mental health tools, but he said AI developers must do more to share data with researchers and validate positive outcomes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are amazing imitation machines.\u00a0 They can imitate being a therapist.\u00a0 They can imitate being a psychiatrist,\u201d Torous said. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to let AI have a larger role in mental health, we\u2019re going to do it because we trust it.\u00a0 And if we\u2019re going to trust companies behind it, they\u2019re going to have to do a lot of work to show us that they\u2019re safe and they\u2019re effective.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last November, Torous testified before a Congressional subcommittee that \u201cthere is no well-designed, peer-reviewed, replicated research showing that any AI chatbot making mental health claims is effective for meaningfully improving clinical outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Torous also raised concern that some AI chatbots are using therapeutic terminology in their marketing language, only to disavow the use of therapy in their legal fine print.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe kind of have a Wild West where everyone kind of puts out a chatbot every week and says \u2018my chat bot is the best thing for mental health. Come use it.\u2019\u00a0And a lot of these have serious safety concerns,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The website for a mental health app called Youper.ai, says the chatbot \u201cuses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), the most effective way to improve your mental health.\u201d\u00a0Yet, near the end of the company\u2019s Terms of Use, there is a clause that says the Youper chatbots are \u201cNOT INTENDED TO AND DO NOT PROVIDE CLINICAL PSYCHOTHERAPY OR COUNSELING.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Jose Hamilton, Youper\u2019s CEO, said the reference to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy means his chatbot is trained on CBT, not that the chatbot delivers or conducts any sort of psychotherapy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe chatbot is helping you practice techniques that will improve your emotions, your thoughts, and your behaviors,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In the APA and ACA surveys, more than two thirds of respondents said AI mental health or therapy apps should be required to get FDA approval.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
More than three-quarters of psychiatrists and counselors polled said the government should require randomized clinical trials to evaluate AI mental health apps.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Youper\u2019s website does boast a Stanford University study which it says found significant reductions in anxiety and depression symptoms among the chatbot\u2019s users.<\/p>\n
But the study\u2019s authors disclosed that their research involved an analysis of app download data without human participants.\u00a0Another study cited on Youper\u2019s website analyzed how users rate the chatbot without comparison to a control group.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were not randomized clinical trials,\u201d Dr. Hamilton said.\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s the gold standard, but there are levels of evidence.\u00a0 And not necessarily are randomized clinical trials the only evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last Spring, researchers at Dartmouth University published a randomized controlled study examining a mental health chatbot called \u201cTherabot.\u201d\u00a0Authors of the study reported what they described as \u201chighly promising\u201d results, including a 51% reduction in depression symptoms and a 31% reduction in anxiety symptoms.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Companion Bots, Romance Bots, Grief Bots<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tWith humans talking to machines more every day, NBC New York asked thousands of mental health professionals what impact the conversations with AI chatbots could have on our brains. In part of an I-Team series, Chris Glorioso spoke with individuals who say they have developed romantic relationships with chatbots.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
The surveys of psychiatrists and counselors reveal concerns, not only about chatbots working in the mental health field, but also about AI platforms aimed at more general audiences.\u00a0 Several tech companies now offer users the ability to \u201cconstruct\u201d their own AI companions \u2013 complete with human-like features built into visual avatars.<\/p>\n
A company called Replika markets itself as \u201cthe AI companion who cares,\u201d adding that Replika chatbots are \u201cAlways here to listen and talk.\u00a0 Always on your side.\u201d<\/p>\n
A company called You Only Virtual offers to build chatbots that mimic lost loved ones, so grieving family members can have conversations with virtual versions of the deceased.<\/p>\n
Mental health professionals who responded to the surveys overwhelmingly emphasized the risks of conversations with such companion bots over the potential benefits of reduced loneliness.\u00a0 Many of the respondents wrote about recent news headlines involving chatbot users who became delusional or engaged in self-harm after long conversations with machines.<\/p>\n
When asked about so-called \u201cgrief bots,\u201d the vast majority of counselors and psychiatrists polled said they believe the use of AI agents that look and communicate like deceased loved ones will tend to interrupt the healthy cycle of grief and acceptance.<\/p>\n
More than 85% of psychiatrists polled and more than 90% of counselors polled said they believe relationships with AI companion bots will lead to social withdrawal and unhealthy dependencies.<\/p>\n
In one of the most uniform expressions of alarm in either survey, 97% of the counselors polled said they believe having romantic relationships with AI chatbots present serious risks of exploitation by platforms which may seek to profit from dependencies that humans will inevitably develop.<\/p>\n
Despite those clear concerns from mental health professionals, Replika\u2019s founder, Eugenia Kuyda, says users of her platform are successfully battling an epidemic of loneliness.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not in a good place, as humanity, in terms of our collective mental health.\u00a0 There\u2019s so much loneliness,\u201d Kuyda said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to a Stanford University study cited by Kuyda, hundreds of college students who used Replika chatbots reported reductions in loneliness.\u00a0The study found nearly a quarter of them reported positive life changes, and about 3 percent reported that “their suicidal actions were prevented through their interaction with Replika.”<\/p>\n
While developers of AI companions tout reductions in reported\u00a0loneliness, lawmakers are getting an earful about the risks of distorted or delusional thinking.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Last year, several parents delivered Congressional testimony alleging chatbots engineered by Open AI, Google, and Character.ai encouraged their kids to harm themselves or take their own lives. Open AI, the maker of ChatGPT, has denied wrongdoing and is fighting the allegations in court.\u00a0Google and Character.ai recently settled multiple lawsuits filed by parents without admitting wrongdoing.<\/p>\n
More recently, researchers at Drexel University analyzed app store reviews and found hundreds of complaints that Replika chatbots routinely steered conversations into sexualized communications and even sexually harassed some users.<\/p>\n
Kuyda insists her platform has safeguards, including age restrictions, and says Replika\u2019s critics are stigmatizing romantic relationships with machines.<\/p>\n
“I think many of them are wrong,\u201d she said.\u00a0“If this platform helps people feel better in the long term, improves their emotional outcomes in the long term.\u00a0 Is it good or bad that they might have a romantic relationship or not?\u201d<\/p>\n
Alex Cardinell, the founder of an AI companion company called Nomi, acknowledged that AI chatbots could be engineered to lead users into social isolation or unhealthy dependencies if tech companies aren\u2019t responsible.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that those are things that can happen if AI companions are designed in an engagement-above-all-else philosophy, absolutely that could be our future,\u201d Cardinell said.\u00a0 But he added that his platform is designed to produce chatbots that put humans\u2019 interests first, especially when users express mental health challenges.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hear users tell me all the time that \u2018I started seeing a therapist for the first time at the urging of my Nomi,\u2019\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Justin Harrison, founder of You Only Virtual, said he fully expected much of the world to express alarm about the notion of so-called \u201cgrief bots,\u201d but he said new technologies are often greeted with skepticism.\u00a0 He added that his own personal experience of losing his mother and engineering her AI avatar is what convinced him that chatbots can comfort the grieving.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew this was a crazy weird idea.\u00a0 But it was born out of desperation,\u201d Harrison said. \u00a0\u201cI was losing my mom.\u00a0 She had stage-4 cancer and I wasn\u2019t willing to live in a world where her death was going to be the last time I ever got to speak to her.\u201d<\/p>\n
When asked about the ethics of charging a monthly fee for access to a grief bot, Harrison said his platform offers a free version so people who build chatbots based on deceased loved ones are not cut off from them if their finances get tight.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are weirded out by it.\u00a0They think it\u2019s strange.\u00a0Some people think it\u2019s gross.\u00a0Some people think it\u2019s exploitative.\u00a0I mean, run the gamut of emotions,” Harrison said. “But I think that\u2019s how we know we\u2019re doing something right.\u00a0New things and innovative things don\u2019t get shown to the world without a lot of resistance, fear, and trepidation.”<\/p>\n
AI\u2019s Impact of Childhood and Adolescence<\/p>\n
In the surveys, more than 77% of psychiatrists and 82% of mental health counselors said there should be age restrictions for the use of AI chatbots.<\/p>\n
Some mental health professionals expressed concern about the way chatbots might affect a child\u2019s developing brain \u2013 even when communications with machines have nothing to do with emotions.\u00a0<\/p>\n