I Am an On-line Mental Health Counselor. I Am a Robot.

     A recently published cross-sectional study surveyed a thousand youths and young adults about using on-line AI sites for their mental health issues. 13 percent of all the participants had asked AI chatbots for mental health advice, but a full 22 percent of the 18-21 year old participants had consulted AI about their mental health concerns.

     92 percent of them felt that they had received helpful advice from the AI chatbot. 65 percent of them sought AI advice at least once a month, and 10 percent of the 18-12 year olds contacted AI for that purpose almost daily.

     That percentage of youth using AI for consultation about their own mental health translates into 5.4 million young Americans.

     The survey was conducted by RAND, Harvard, Brown, Mass General Brigham, and Boston Children’s Hospital and the results were published in the JAMA Network Open. The surveyors initially contacted just over two thousand young people and half responded, almost exactly half of them female and half male.
   
    The researchers only speculate on some of the various cultural anomalies revealed by the study – such as the low percentage of Blacks who seek online mental health advice – and Peter Simons, who reported on the study at Mad in America, noted the dangers from artificially created advice paradigms that can encourage delusional thinking about mental health and can even encourage suicidal thinking in their on-line clients.

     Those are not the largest red flags from the study, however.

     How is that one out of every five 18-21 year olds in this country has taken it into his or her young head that they have a mental health issue of such magnitude that they feel compelled to seek advice so often from an AI chatbot?

     Either there really are that many mentally ill youth in the country, or there are that many youth in the country who have been brainwashed into believing that they might be mentally ill.

     Psychiatry and Big Pharma continue to publicly promote a high number of mentally unhealthy Americans. Forty percent is their most popular PR figure. That number, however, is a compilation of the results of the ubiquitous mental health questionnaires they have introduced into schools, doctors’ offices, and hospitals for people to innocently take.

     Those initial mental health screening tools like the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) for depression and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) are proven to result in a high number of “false positive” responses because of the low specificity of their questions as wells as their cultural, demographic and gender inconsistencies.

     Both are perfect examples of what can be achieved with “leading questions.” From them, a person with a temporary upset over a deceased pet or an argument with a parent can be claimed by psychiatry to have a mental health issue.

     Does that mean that forty percent of all Americans might have had a recent upset in life? Probably. Does that also mean that forty percent of all Americans have a mental health issue requiring some form of treatment…preferably pharmacological, of course, to help fill Big Pharma’s coffers? Probably not.

     Big Pharma uses its forty percent number to lobby for large increases in  government funded mental health treatment in this country for those without private insurance. As many as 35 percent of foster children are on at least one psychotropic medication, and in residential treatment centers or group homes half of those foster children are on psychiatric medication, paid for by the government (aka, by us taxpayers).

     It’s bad enough that our government has been convinced to increase funding for mental health treatment because of these falsely inflated numbers of Americans with mental health problems. It’s far worse that Big Pharma’s insidious marketing of what constitutes “mental illness” has now apparently successfully brainwashed one out of every five of our 18-21 year olds.

     These unfortunate, now robotic thinking youth are today consulting with on-line robots to form a new, perfectly thoughtless and perfectly automatic money making machine for Big Pharma.