On-line AI Mental Health Chatbots: Feeding the Tapeworm

     Richard Sears reported on the Mad in America website this week about a new AI mental health chatbot study just published in the Journal of Medical Internet  Research. A Syracuse University research team recruited 1805 participants between 18 and 49 years of age for their anonymous on-line survey about on-line AI mental health chatbot use.

     The invitation to participate was made through an on-line participant recruitment system that described the survey as focusing on perceptions and attitudes toward seeking mental health help, but it did not refer to AI. The overall question for this young to middle age audience was to name the sources they typically turn to when facing mental health concerns.

     Amazingly, a full one third of the respondents said they consulted an on-line AI chatbot at least once a week about mental health concerns. Participants who self-reported moderate to severe symptoms of depression or anxiety were 71 percent more likely to discuss their mental health with an AI chatbot.

     This was not the most scientifically exacting survey, of course, but was more a self-reported data collection. However, given such a significant number of participants, it does suggest an underlying tapeworm-like motif to AI mental health chatbot use.

     Just as an insatiably hungry tapeworm is caused by ingesting contaminated food, these heavy users of AI mental health chatbots develop an uncontrolled appetite for obsessive self-diagnosis aided by these AI programs.

     The original contamination? Their acceptance of a DSM-based label of a mental disorder for themselves. The enforced stigma of being so labeled – either by another or by themselves – sets off their insatiable search to solve this mystery about their mental make-up through hours of on-line interaction with these chatbots…programmed, of course, by the same minds that came up with the DSM labels in the first place.

     The sad irony is that there is no mystery solve about their mental health.

     There is only the original mental contamination from that false DSM label that they’ve been given. The sad, hopeless on-line pursuit that they’ve taken on to try to solve that unsolvable mystery is what follows.

     They’ve innocently ingested a DSM tapeworm that keeps trying to eat its own tail.