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ACTON, MASS. (WHDH) – When Phoenix Ehmann asked an AI chatbot to help process a conflict, its response left them feeling even angrier. Minutes later, someone who saw them called the police.
“One of the places I trained for improv wasn’t respecting one of my boundaries for scenes,” they said. “I looked to AI to process it, and it said, ‘No, they should be honoring your boundary. This is just awful.’ I decided to go for a walk, but because of the amount of anger that I was just radiating, I actually got the cops called on me.”
It was a turning point for Ehmann, an Acton resident who uses they/them pronouns. Months earlier, after completing therapy and being laid off from their cybersecurity job, they had increasingly turned to artificial intelligence for emotional support.
“Sometimes I’d say, ‘Hey, my job search has become completely awful, and I’m sad. Give me a pep talk,’” they said. “It did a good job giving me emotional support.”
But since the encounter with police, the 42-year-old has largely stopped relying on AI, instead using grounding techniques to help manage difficult moments.
Licensed therapists say Ehmann’s experience is far from unique. They caution that AI is designed to keep users engaged by validating people’s feelings rather than challenging them.
“If you’ve ever used AI, you’ll get, ‘Fantastic thought! Great comment! You are right on target!’” said Dr. Eugene Beresin, executive director of the Clay Center for Young and Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital. “What they’re doing is they’re fostering repeated engagement and emotional dependency.”
Experts say that emotional dependency can be dangerous. Several artificial intelligence companies are facing wrongful death lawsuits alleging conversations with chatbots contributed to suicides and other harmful behavior.
Companies facing litigation, including OpenAI and Character.AI, say they have invested in new safety features to detect when a user may be in crisis and to prevent chats about explicit content. But mental health experts caution those safeguards may not be enough.
“Clinicians are trained on how to pick up on a lot of these risk-related challenges, whether it be harm to self or harm to others,” said Dr. Emily Mellen, a clinical psychologist at Tufts Medical Center. “It still feels like a lot of AI models are being trained in an afterthought sort of way, as opposed to having that be a core part of their creation.”
Therapists recognize AI isn’t going away. As the mental health field faces a growing workforce shortage, millions of people are turning to chatbots for support. The Health Resources and Services Administration predicts that by 2037, there will be a shortage of 88,000 mental health counselors and 114,000 addiction counselors.
Meanwhile, a new study from the American Psychological Association found that one-third of psychologists said their patients are using AI to supplement treatment, and close to 40 percent to self-diagnose.
That’s why experts are encouraging patients to be open with their therapists about how they’re using the emerging technology so they can evaluate the information together. Some mental health experts say chatbots can play a helpful role when they’re used alongside therapy to reinforce coping skills—not replace a therapist.
“It can help with things like general wellbeing, keeping track of their symptoms, and learning meditation skills or coping skills,” said Dr. Ellen Braaten, executive director of the Learning and Emotional Assessment Program at Mass General Hospital. “It can reinforce the sorts of things that a therapist wants them to be doing more of and help them keep track of the behaviors that they want them to do less of.”
Rather than framing the conversation as AI versus therapy, therapists say the focus should be on how the technology can complement care without replacing the human relationship at its core.
“Sometimes there can be a little bit of either moral panic or saying this is going to be the savior of everything,” Mellen said. “I think right now the conversation is AI or therapy, but what does it look like for there to be good therapy happening in a world where AI is one of our tools?”
As Ehmann moves away from the artificial world and focuses on developing coping and grounding skills they learned in therapy, they hope AI companies become more transparent about what the technology should be used for.
“AI is a very powerful technology that people don’t understand how to use, and there’s way too much assumptions about the results,” they said “I think there needs to be a lot more transparency about what AI actually can do.”
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