Name
Self-Report Use of AI as a Mental Health Tool: A Prospective Survey of Patients in a Large Healthcare System
Description

Research has shown that mental health is a common reason why people are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools (e.g., Chat GPT) Our team sent invites to over 80,000 patients to complete a brief survey on their use of AI for mental health purposes, with over 10,000 patients completing the survey. Patients were grouped into one of three groups: 1) no documented behavioral health needs in previous 3 years, referred for behavioral health care but did not receive care, received behavioral health care in our health system in the previous 3 years. More detailed reasons for using AI than have been reported in the literature were revealed and signficant differences in use patterns were seen between the three groups.

Speakers
Bill Sieber, PhD
Co-Authors
Alison O’Daffer, Christian Vallido, Bahar Talabnejad, Sean Johnson, Cassandra Vieten, Cinnamon Bloss
Content Level
All Audience
Tags
Innovations, Policy and Systems Change, Population and public health, Research and evaluation
Session Type
Poster
Objective 1
Identify the estimated prevalence of use of AI tools for behavioral health.
Objective 2
List the most common specific uses of AI for behavioral health issues.
Objective 3
Describe the ways in which those with a prior need for behavioral health services differ in their use of AI than those without a prior need/use of behavioral health services.
Content Reference 1

Stade, E., Tait, Z., Campione, S., & Stirman, S. (2025). Current real-world use of large language models for mental health. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/ygx5q_v1

Content Reference 2

McBain, R. K., Bozick, R., Diliberti, M., Zhang, L. A., Zhang, F., Burnett, A., ... & Yu, H. (2025). Use of generative AI for mental health advice among US adolescents and young adults. JAMA Network Open, 8(11), e2542281. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.42281

Content Reference 3

Karnaze, M. M., & Bloss, C. S. (2026). Six reasons to study emotional support from conversational artificial intelligence. Nature Human Behaviour, 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02412-9

Content Reference 4

Moore, J., Grabb, D., Agnew, W., Klyman, K., Chancellor, S., Ong, D. C., & Haber, N. (2025, June). Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 599-627).

Content Reference 5

Zhang, Y., Zhao, D., Hancock, J. T., Kraut, R., & Yang, D. (2025). The rise of AI companions: how human-chatbot relationships influence well-being. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.12605.