After almost a year of constructive therapy, I broke up with my therapist because she suggested I use ChatGPT. Yes, you read that right. We spent our last session talking about new coping strategies. “I know a lot of therapists are probably against AI,” she said, “but I’ve found it pretty useful in my personal life.” Her reasoning was that, since a tool like ChatGPT acts like an echo chamber, if I were to write down whatever I was anxious about, maybe reading how AI spits things back out will help me “snap out of it.” On the one hand, I understood her intention. But I still couldn’t believe the recommendation had left her mouth.
If it wasn’t already obvious, I hate AI. With a passion. As a writer who comes from a family of many teachers, I’ve seen firsthand how the outsourcing of certain tasks to AI has devalued the creative spaces I belong to and, quite frankly, made us lazier. I do have to use certain AI automations at my job–and I’m lucky enough to have supervisors that don’t force me to use it more than what’s required–but if it were up to me, I wouldn’t touch it at all.
Despite my personal values around AI, I still found myself questioning whether I was being irrational for ghosting my therapist over this. I liked working with her up until now, and I could always just ignore this one bit of advice, right? But the longer I thought about it, my questions became so much bigger than myself. Are other therapists recommending AI to their clients? Will AI platforms take over the mental health industry, just as they have so many others? I sat down with three licensed therapists to get their thoughts on AI and settle the debate once and for all: Is using ChatGPT a terrible idea, or can it be beneficial?
Experts Consulted
At The Everygirl, we believe that wellness advice should be grounded in accurate, science-backed information to ensure our readers can make informed decisions about their health and well-being. That’s why we prioritize consulting trusted, credible experts—so every piece of content is both reliable and empowering.
Kaylee Bullen is a licensed therapist specializing in OCD and anxiety, and the owner of a multi-state group therapy practice. Through her clinical work and her social media, she is dedicated to destigmatizing mental health and helping people better understand and live alongside their anxiety and intrusive thoughts. Kaylee is licensed to practice in Michigan, California, and Louisiana.
Debbie Missud is a licensed psychotherapist, author, consultant, and founder of The Manhattan Psychotherapy Collective, a New York City group practice specializing in trauma-informed care for women. Beyond the therapy room, she’s a mental health educator known as @therapydebbie, where she blends clinical expertise with humor and humanity to make complex concepts around mental health and healing feel relatable and accessible.
Madeleine Dale is the owner and founder of Tuesday Counseling, PLLC and a Licensed Professional Counselor in New York City. Madeleine offers an inclusive and affirming space for all genders, sexualities, and racial ethnicities. She has extensive training in LGBTQIA+ affirming counseling and trauma-informed therapy modalities (IFS, EMDR, etc).
So, is it actually bad to use ChatGPT as a therapist?
Quick answer, based on the experts I spoke with: Yes. Using an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude can be (best case) unhelpful, or (worst case) dangerous. Here’s why:
Therapy involves so much vulnerable information
I recognize that I’m biased here, but my biggest issue with AI being used or recommended in therapy is the nature of what gets shared. Sessions with a therapist are supposed to be a safe space, but there’s no real safety if you use AI–and no way of knowing who has access to whatever you disclose on a platform like ChatGPT. Kaylee Bullen, a licensed OCD and anxiety therapist, expressed a similar feeling. “The way mental health is viewed in our society and in our government, I am very cautious of integrating any AI [into sessions]… there’s so much vulnerable information that is wrapped up in therapy and in treatment, it just feels so invasive.”
From the other side of the couch, Madeleine Dale, a licensed counselor in New York, said that her issue with using AI in therapy is as much of a trust issue for her clients as it is for her. “If a client is telling me [they’re] getting a lot of helpful insights from AI, it would make me wonder if maybe I’m just not the right fit for this person, if they have needs they don’t feel safe bringing to me.” While it can be extremely difficult or emotional to open up about mental health struggles, therapy allows you a level of privacy that AI can’t promise, and the right therapist will have the knowledge and training to help you heal.
AI can reinforce the exact thought patterns therapy is supposed to challenge
Conversations online and professional research both suggest that AI addiction is becoming more and more prevalent. This is incredibly dangerous for a number of reasons, but especially in a therapy context. Debbie Missud, LMHC-D, specializes in complex trauma and anxiety and is all too familiar with how a reliance on AI affects her clients. “It’s fostering dependence on something external,” she said. “Some of our trauma responses can be a lack of confidence in yourself and needing to seek reassurance from everybody else around you, so you turn to AI. But AI is biased towards you. It will not challenge you.”
This design poses a particular danger to people dealing with something like OCD, which thrives on reassurance seeking. “AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are designed to keep you coming back,” Bullen added. “They’re designed to do exactly what we don’t want for OCD and high anxiety, which is to keep you engaged in this thought loop.” Unlike a therapist, who can help you learn to challenge and overcome any unhelpful thoughts or beliefs, AI is more likely to validate those beliefs and keep you stuck. That validation might make you feel better at first, but it never lasts for long.
“ChatGPT and Claude are designed to keep you coming back…exactly what we don’t want for OCD and high anxiety.”
Are there healthy ways to use ChatGPT for your mental health?
To understand concepts, not diagnose yourself
While nobody I spoke to directly recommended using AI in your mental health journey, they did note a few ways that they’ve seen clients use it as a supplement to their sessions in a helpful way. One such example was researching mental health concepts. “My clients aren’t necessarily using AI as a replacement therapist, but if they need to talk through something objectively, they’ll often use AI to help them check the facts of a situation,” Missud said. It would be better to use AI to help you understand a particular concept that you’re discussing in your therapy sessions, rather than asking anything personal. Just be sure you’re fact-checking whatever answers AI gives you. Think: it could be helpful as a research tool in addition to therapy, not as therapy itself.
To give itself boundaries (yes, really)
In therapy, this idea is called harm reduction, which teaches you to reduce the negative effects of problematic behavior instead of going completely “cold turkey.” Bullen looks at her clients’ reliance on AI with a harm reduction approach. “With how OCD and anxiety work, there is such a strong urge to have certainty and find answers,” she said. “So how can we let ChatGPT know that you have OCD so it doesn’t reassure you constantly [to the point] it becomes compulsive, or stops the conversation?” Ideally, though, she added that her job is to reduce a client’s turning to AI so much that it isn’t needed at all.
But what if ChatGPT is the only “therapy” I can afford?
One conversation that popped up in my interviews was that a potential benefit to using AI for therapy is that it may democratize mental health assistance, as not everyone has consistent access to therapy. Many therapists are out-of-network with insurance providers, if they take insurance at all. “There is such a barrier to entry, and accessible care is really hard to find, especially quality accessible care,” Dale said. It isn’t hard to see why AI might pose a particular draw to people seeking therapy services who aren’t able to afford them. But AI is still far from the only available option. “That’s a big reason why, ethically, we are very strongly encouraged to offer pro bono sessions, or a sliding scale payment. I would so much rather someone get quality accessible care than turn to something that I don’t trust,” Dale added.
The bottom line: Can ChatGPT replace a therapist?
If you’re already using ChatGPT to talk through your feelings, don’t assume your therapist is judging you for it—but that doesn’t mean they recommend it, either. Ideally, working with an actual therapist will help you think deeper about why you turn to AI when you’re anxious or depressed so that you aren’t relying on AI anymore, something that all three of the experts I spoke with expressed is becoming increasingly common.
AI is capable of many things, and there may be ways to use it as a tool alongside therapy, but it just can’t compete with the relationship, nuance, and individualized care you get from a human therapist. “At the end of the day, research has shown time and time again that the best predictor of outcome in therapy is your relationship with your therapist,” Missud said. “You don’t have a relationship with AI.” And let’s keep it that way.
Hannah Carapellotti, Contributing Writer
Hannah is an Ann Arbor-based writer with a bachelor’s in English and writing from the University of Michigan. Outside of The Everygirl, Hannah has written for The Michigan Daily, where she also served as an editor. She currently works at an independent bookstore and is interning for a literary agency.
