Therapist Warns Patients About AI — Then Uses It Anyway
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- Sarah Darghouth, a clinical psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, reports patients increasingly bring ChatGPT and Claude into sessions, including one patient who ended a relationship after ChatGPT told her to break up and another who repaired a marital fight using AI-suggested language.
- Darghouth warns patients that AI therapy carries documented risks — worsened anxiety, false information, increased isolation, delusional beliefs, and suicidal thinking — and describes patients who don't leave their beds, 'vulnerably uploading their private lives to big tech.'
- Despite those professional warnings, Darghouth admits she reached for ChatGPT herself at 7:20am on a Sunday when her nine-year-old had a tantrum, wanting immediate presence rather than parenting technique: 'It worked. So does it matter?'
- Darghouth cites that less than 7% of people with mental health and substance use conditions currently receive effective treatment, framing universal AI access as an imperfect but potentially significant expansion of care.
- Darghouth argues that the 'mess' of human therapy — conflict, hesitation, stalling, wrong decisions, emotional explosions — is therapy's 'most prized possession' and a liability for AI's 'clean, all-knowing stance' to replicate on the slow path of human healing.
- Darghouth recounts a patient returning after what felt like a failed session to say it was her laugh at a joke — not the therapeutic dialogue — that helped, illustrating the unpredictable, non-algorithmic nature of human connection AI cannot engineer.
Why it matters: With under 7% of people with mental health conditions receiving effective treatment and AI therapy already resolving real problems in Darghouth's own practice, therapists face pressure to integrate AI or cede ground — but the author argues the chaotic, imperfect human relationship may be what actually heals, a distinction AI's efficiency cannot replicate.
