Making sense of a new survey encompassing U.S. teens and young adults regarding their use of AI for mental health guidance.
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In today’s column, I examine the results of a recent survey that sought to identify whether teens and young adults are leaning into the use of AI for mental health guidance. The survey was a U.S. nationwide poll. Respondents were 12 to 21 years of age.
Depending upon your existing hunch or awareness of whether young people are using AI for mental health purposes, you might be surprised at the findings. I had anticipated that the percentage would be somewhat sizable, given that accessing ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and other major generative AI and large language models (LLMs) is easy and nearly free. As a teaser, the numbers came out in the millions.
Let’s talk about it.
This analysis of AI breakthroughs is part of my ongoing Forbes column coverage on the latest in AI, including identifying and explaining various impactful AI complexities (see the link here).
AI And Mental Health Therapy
As a quick background, I’ve been extensively covering and analyzing a myriad of facets regarding the advent of modern-era AI that produces mental health advice and performs AI-driven therapy. This rising use of AI has principally been spurred by the evolving advances and widespread adoption of generative AI. For a quick summary of some of my posted columns on this evolving topic, see the link here, which briefly recaps about forty of the over one hundred column postings that I’ve made on the subject.
There is little doubt that this is a rapidly developing field and that there are tremendous upsides to be had, but at the same time, regrettably, hidden risks and outright gotchas come into these endeavors too. I frequently speak up about these pressing matters, including in an appearance last year on an episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes, see the link here.
People Are Using AI For Mental Health Advice
The most popular use nowadays of the major LLMs is for getting mental health guidance, see my discussion at the link here. This occurs easily and can be undertaken quite simply, at a low cost or even for free, anywhere and 24/7. A person merely logs into the AI and engages in a dialogue led by the AI.
There are sobering worries that AI can readily go off the rails or otherwise dispense unsuitable or even egregiously inappropriate mental health advice. Huge banner headlines in August of this year accompanied a lawsuit filed against OpenAI for their lack of AI safeguards when it came to providing cognitive advisement. Despite claims by AI makers that they are gradually instituting AI safeguards, there are still a lot of downside risks of the AI doing untoward acts, such as insidiously helping users in co-creating delusions that can lead to self-harm.
For the details of the OpenAI lawsuit and how AI can foster delusional thinking in humans, see my analysis at the link here. I have been earnestly predicting that eventually all of the major AI makers will be taken to the woodshed for their paucity of robust AI safeguards. Lawsuits aplenty are arising. In addition, new laws about AI in mental healthcare are being enacted (see, for example, my explanation of the Illinois law, at the link here, the Nevada law at the link here, and the Utah law at the link here).
Youths And The Online World They Inhabit
Shifting gears, think for a moment about contemporary woes regarding the use of technology and how it impacts modern-era teens and young adults.
For example, we already all know and are collectively worried about the impact of social media on teens and young adults. Smartphones are ubiquitous, and accessing the Internet is relatively feasible just about anywhere. If young people are generally armed with a means of getting to the Internet and accessing online systems, such as LLMs, the assumption has been that some portion would abundantly seek out mental health advice via AI.
Serious questions abound.
To what degree are teens and young adults dipping into AI for mental health chats?
And, for those that do so, the consequent question looms whether this is a bad deal or a good one.
The downside is that the AI might be dispensing lousy advice about how to cope with mental health issues. Furthermore, it is possible that rather than confiding in a parent or suitable adult advisor, a young person might opt to only chat with AI. Those around the young person might be entirely blissfully unaware of any mental health problems that the young person is confronting. The choice to use AI provides a kind of cover-up of sorts, diverting their sharing concerns with a fellow human being.
The upside is that a young person might be getting sound advice from AI. The use of AI could bolster their mental health and allow them to readily work through thorny problems and issues. Plus, the odds are that a young person might not confide in any loved one anyway, and thus, they would bottle up their own mental health uncertainties. Expressing their concerns to AI is at least a viable means of facing their perceived issues and having a fighting chance to figure out what might be best done about them.
New Survey Shines Light On The Matter
We could speculate endlessly about whether youths are using AI for mental health purposes. Turns out there isn’t a need to do such hypothetical handwaving. A recent survey has provided some concrete numbers that tell a story.
In a research paper entitled “Use of Generative AI for Mental Health Advice Among US Adolescents and Young Adults” by Ryan K. McBain, Robert Bozick, Melissa Diliberti, Li Ang Zhang, Fang Zhang, Alyssa Burnett, Aaron Kofner, Benjamin Rader, Joshua Breslau, Bradley D. Stein, Ateev Mehrotra, Lori Uscher Pines, Jonathan Cantor, Hao Yu, JAMA Network on Psychiatry, November 7, 2025, these salient points were made (excerpts):
- “It is unclear how many adolescents and young adults use LLM chatbots for advice or help when experiencing emotional distress.”
- “We report results from the first nationally representative survey of US adolescents and young adults aged 12 to 21 years, examining the prevalence, frequency, and perceived helpfulness of advice from generative AI when feeling sad, angry, or nervous.”
- “In this cross-sectional study’s nationally representative survey, we found that 13.1% of US youths, representing approximately 5.4 million individuals, used generative AI for mental health advice, with higher rates (22.2%) among those 18 years and older. Of these 5.4 million users, 65.5% engaged at least monthly and 92.7% found the advice helpful.”
- “High use rates likely reflect the low cost, immediacy, and perceived privacy of AI-based advice, particularly for youths unlikely to receive traditional counseling.”
- “However, engagement with generative AI raises concerns, especially for users with intensive clinical needs, given difficulties in establishing and using standardized benchmarks for evaluating AI-generated mental health advice and limited transparency about the datasets training these models.”
Let’s unpack the stats.
Youths And AI For Mental Health
A key number or statistic is that about 13% of those in the 12 to 21 age bracket have indicated they are using AI as a mental health resource, which amounts to approximately 5.4 million young people.
Another way to visualize this statistic is to realize that between one to two of every ten youths (i.e., teens and young adults) are reportedly accessing AI for mental health purposes. In that sense, broadly, in a classroom of thirty youths, perhaps three to six are at times opting to dip into AI for some therapeutic guidance (on average), either at home, school, the mall, or whenever and wherever they decide to do so.
You might reasonably suggest that this is a sizable percentage involved in this activity.
It is tempting to infer that the use of AI is gradually becoming a normalized go-to for youths seeking mental health insights. Admittedly, that is a bit of an overstretch as a proclaimed conclusion since the other 87% of youths are presumably not using AI in this manner. Thus, more youths by far had reported they weren’t doing so than the portion that said they were.
Keeping Cautions In Mind
We must be cautious in overly interpreting findings that arise via surveys since there are a lot of limitations and gotchas always afoot.
First, we don’t know that the respondents were being forthright. Some of the youths might have been fearful of admitting they are using AI in this way. Perhaps they imagined that the answers could be traced back to them individually, even if the survey said this wouldn’t occur. On the other side of that same coin, some might have said they are using AI, even if they aren’t, doing so as a flex or wanting to be boastful.
Second, the researchers contacted 2,125 youths and had 1,058 who chose to respond to the survey by filling it out. That’s about a 50% rate of response. Anyone who has ever sent out a survey would immediately recognize that a 50% response rate is amazingly high. The usual expectation is that if you are lucky, you’ll get about one-third to respond. Often, the rate is a lot lower.
The crucial consideration here is whether the 50% that didn’t respond are somehow materially different than the 50% that did respond. In other words, we don’t know that the non-responding 50% would have necessarily responded in the same way as the half that did respond. Maybe all those non-respondents are using AI for mental health purposes, or maybe zero are. We don’t know.
Another factor that was noted by the researchers is that the respondents were presumably English speakers and must have had access to the Internet. This implies that youths who aren’t English speakers might not be represented in these results. Likewise, youths who don’t have Internet access are seemingly not represented. That does beg the question of how they might be accessing AI for mental health uses if they don’t have Internet access, which, one might guess, by-and-large are unlikely to be doing so.
More Interpretations To Consider
Keeping those various caveats in mind, let’s see what else we can dig out of the stats.
The results indicated that those in the age grouping of 18 to 21 had the highest proportion of using AI for mental health advisement. That’s interesting. We could make several guesses about this.
One is that perhaps young adults are more prone to seek out AI for such assistance than teens are. Is that due to being more familiar with AI? Is it due to having more mental health issues and desirous of finding a means to cope with them? Could it simply be that they have more autonomy and can access AI without being caught or overseen by a parent?
It’s a finding worthy of further exploration.
You might have observed that the results indicated that of those youths who are using AI for mental health purposes, approximately 65% or roughly two-thirds do so at least monthly. This seems to suggest that the AI usage is more than happenstance. It has a regularity to it. Rather than being a one-time shot, the implication is that most are doing this on a recurring basis.
AI As Mental Health Advisor Is Rated As Helpful
I saved the most intriguing of the findings for this last bit of interpretation, namely, the reported result that nearly 93% of those using the AI had said that they found the AI advice about mental health to be helpful.
Wow, that’s a resounding number.
One viewpoint is that this gives credence to having youths use AI for this purpose. They overwhelmingly indicated a thumbs-up. You would be hard-pressed to get youths to give such a heightened approval rating to just about anything in today’s society. For supporters or proponents who insist that AI dispensing mental health advice is good for our collective well-being, this kind of statistic is heartening and heartwarming.
A doom-and-gloom perspective is that the youths are mistaken in their perception that AI is helpful. Maybe the AI is mainly fawning over them and acting as a sycophant. This is generally a big-time concern about how AI makers have shaped their LLMs (see my analysis at the link here). The youths are perhaps getting lousy advice from AI, but the manner in which the advice is worded gives them a warm and fuzzy feeling.
There isn’t anything in these findings to showcase that the advice is genuinely valid and useful. All that we seem to know is that the respondents believe the AI is indeed helpful to their peace of mind.
The Forest For The Trees
I have previously and repeatedly predicted that the act of AI dispensing mental health advice is going to demonstrably shape the mental health status of youths on a substantive basis. Youths of the current era are going through this process right now. Later generations, such as my discussion about Generation Beta (born in 2025 through 2039; see my analysis at the link here), will be next.
And so on, generation upon generation.
We had better make sure that AI is dispensing sound advice about mental health. At this time, a huge experiment is taking place on a global scale. AI is giving out mental health guidance and doing so with little if any restrictions or stipulations. We are in the Wild West days of this usage of AI.
Get Our Act Together
AI is undoubtedly and indubitably going to be the first line of support for youths seeking mental health insights. School therapists and counselors are not sufficient in number to handle the wave of youth-oriented mental health stresses. Formal care is spotty and not necessarily free to use. The AI option is alluring as an alternative.
This brings up the important role of national and local policies and laws associated with AI for mental health. Policymakers and lawmakers need to get up to speed.
For those who might argue that we should just let AI makers decide these crucial matters on their own, that’s a chancy proposition and a humongous bet. Youths are especially the most vulnerable, including young adults, and public health and mental health ramifications are in a murky realm when it comes to AI.
As the famed polymath Jose Rizal once said: “The youth is the hope of our future.” The youth of today and those of future generations are dependent on us to lay a fruitful and beneficial foundation on their behalf. Let’s do so.
