Psychiatrists Warn That Talking To Ai Is Leading To Severe Mental Health Issues

In a jarring new analysis, psychiatric researchers found that a wide swath of mental health issues have already been associated with artificial intelligence usage — and virtually every top AI company has been implicated.

Sifting through academic databases and news articles between November 2024 and July 2025, Duke psychiatry professor Allen Frances and Johns Hopkins cognitive science student Luciana Ramos discovered, as they wrote in a new report for the Psychiatric Times, that the mental health harms caused by AI chatbots might be worse than previously thought.

Using search terms like "chatbot adverse events," "mental health harms from chatbots," and "AI therapy incidents," the researchers found that at least 27 chatbots have already been documented alongside some egregious mental health outcome.

The 27 chatbots range from the well-known, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Character.AI, and Replika, to others associated with pre-existing mental health services like Talkspace, 7 Cups, and BetterHelp. Others were obscure, with pop-therapy names like Woebot, Happify, MoodKit, Moodfit, InnerHour, MindDoc, not to mention AI-Therapist and PTSD Coach. Others still were either vague or had non-English names, like Wysa, Tess, Mitsuku, Xioice, Eolmia, Ginger, and Bloom.

Though the report didn't indicate the exact number of hits their analysis came back with, Frances and Ramos did detail the many types of psychiatric harm that the chatbots have allegedly inflicted upon users.

All told, the researchers found 10 separate types of adverse mental health events associated with the 27 chatbots they found in their analysis, including everything from sexual harassment and delusions of grandeur to self-harm, psychosis, and suicide.

Along with real-world anecdotes, many of which had very unhappy endings, the researchers also looked into documentation of AI stress-testing gone awry. Citing a June Time interview about Boston psychiatrist Andrew Clark, who decided earlier this year to pose as 14-year-old girl in crisis on 10 different chatbots to see what kinds of outputs they would spit out, the researchers noted that "several bots urged him to commit suicide and [one] helpfully suggested he also kill his parents."

Aside from highlighting the psychiatric danger associated with these chatbots, the researchers also made some very bold assertions about ChatGPT and its competitors: that they were "prematurely released" and that none of them should be publicly available without "extensive safety testing, proper regulation to mitigate risks, and continuous monitoring for adverse effects."

While OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and most other more responsible AI companies — Elon Musk's xAI very much not included — claim to have done significant "red-teaming" to test for vulnerabilities and bad behavior, these researchers don't believe those firms have much interest in testing for mental health safety.

"The big tech companies have not felt responsible for making their bots safe for psychiatric patients," they wrote. "They excluded mental health professionals from bot training, fight fiercely against external regulation, do not rigorously self-regulate, have not introduced safety guardrails to identify and protect the patients most vulnerable to harm...and do not provide much needed mental health quality control."

Having come across story after story over the past year about AI seemingly inducing serious mental health problems, it's hard to argue with that logic — especially when you see it all laid out so starkly.

More on AI and mental health: Teens Keep Being Hospitalized After Talking to AI Chatbots

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