„Ich habe das Gefühl, es ist ein Freund“: Ein Viertel der Teenager wendet sich zur Unterstützung ihrer psychischen Gesundheit an KI-Chatbots

It’s a real shame that therapy is less accessible than an AI chatbot. And that teens are relying on a product made by a company focused on profit ahead of wellbeing. There are lots of qualified therapists out there but we haven’t figured out how to bridge the gap between people struggling and people having access to talking therapy that can literally save lives. A crying shame imo.

I’m not sure what it would mean to kids, but I know that ibauve used them to help me navigate some reather complex situations at work inside corporate. I could have spoken with a therapist or tried explaining what was going on somewhere on here to a person, but it would have been useless. A therapist would be like, „So how do you feel about it?“ or something, and people on here would just tell me to quit.

Instead, I think I was able to use it properly and went down an entirely different path that provided me with clarity when basically nothing else i can think of would have done it. I asked it how the hell it knew what it was saying and ended up reading Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers.

Any person I would have just worn out hours and hours ago analyzing situations. They couldn’t pay attention in the same way. They couldn’t at the same time also understand enterprise cloud architecture. I would have just been beyond the abilities for basically anyone to be able to help guide, but damn AI could at least pretend to get it.

Ironically, the correct path for me is to still just quit. But now I know for sure why should!

Crazy how fast this is becoming normal. I kinda get why teens end up talking to AI though. It’s there instantly and it doesn’t judge.

I’ve seen people use lighter apps like Dewy chat for the same “someone to talk to at 2am” thing. It makes sense that kids reach for whatever actually responds when someone doesn’t.

It’s not fully clear to me from the article whether a quarter of teens that are looking for mental health support are using AI chatbots for that purpose, or whether a quarter of ALL teens are using AI chatbots for mental health support. I believe it says the latter, but that suggests that (at least) a quarter of all UK teens are in need of mental health support – which sounds extremely high to me and which, given the meagre amounts of money available for that in the NHS today, is not going to be met by human therapists any time soon.

Maybe we as a society should make mental health services more accessible, free to use and socially acceptable.

I hope that all the countries that are banning social media for children 16/18 and under. See a change sooner than later. Cloud architecture as a whole and its use cases build around SaaS, social and performance marketing have done a lot of hard over the last 2 and a half decades.