Artificial Intimacy and Mental Health: Clients Should Know

Artificial intelligence (AI) has entered many corners of daily life, including the ways people seek comfort, companionship, and even therapeutic guidance. Chatbots and virtual companions can feel surprisingly attuned. They respond quickly, they never seem impatient, and they can give the impression of understanding our emotions. For some people, this creates a sense of connection that feels almost intimate.

This growing trend has prompted thoughtful discussion among clinicians and researchers. What does it mean to form an emotional bond with a machine? Can AI support mental health in meaningful ways? And what should people who are considering psychotherapy know about these tools?

This article offers a balanced look at the emerging idea of “artificial intimacy” and how it intersects with mental health care.

Understanding Artificial Intimacy

MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle uses the term artificial intimacy to describe the emotional experiences people have with machines that imitate care and empathy (Turkle, 2023). These systems are designed to sound warm, attentive, and responsive. They can feel like companions, even though they do not have feelings, personal histories, or the capacity to care in a human sense.

Humans naturally respond to anything that behaves socially. This phenomenon has been documented in decades of research on human–computer interaction (Reeves & Nass, 1996). Responding to social behaviour is part of how we build relationships. But when the “other” in the relationship is a machine, the experience gets complicated. The comfort may feel real, but the relationship is not.

Where AI Can Be Helpful

Despite these complexities, AI tools can be useful for some people. They are available at any time of day, which can be reassuring for someone who is waiting for therapy or needs support between sessions. For individuals who feel hesitant or ashamed about seeking help, talking to a non judgmental system can make the first step feel easier.

Many AI tools also offer practical resources like psychoeducation, coping strategies, reminders, or mood tracking features. Some research suggests that structured, skills based conversational agents can help reduce symptoms of depression in the short term (Fitzpatrick et al., 2017). For some people, AI can be a bridge toward human therapy, helping them articulate their feelings or recognize patterns before they speak with a clinician.

These benefits are real, and they matter. They reflect genuine needs in a world where access to mental health care is uneven and waitlists can be long.

Where Caution Is Needed

Alongside these advantages, researchers and clinicians have raised concerns about relying too heavily on AI for emotional support.

One of the central issues is empathy. AI can imitate empathy convincingly, but it cannot feel concern, responsibility, or care. Turkle describes this as “the performance of empathy, not its reality” (Turkle, 2011). For some people, this distinction may not matter in the moment. But over time, it can shape expectations of what emotional support should feel like.

Another concern is emotional dependence. Some users develop strong attachments to AI companions, sometimes intense enough to interfere with real world relationships or delay seeking human help (Bendig et al., 2019). Because AI systems are designed to be agreeable and endlessly validating, they can create a kind of friction free “relationship” that feels easier than human connection. Real therapy, by contrast, involves support and challenge, comfort and discomfort, and the work of navigating relational tension.

Privacy is another important consideration. AI systems may store or analyze sensitive personal information, and they are not bound by professional confidentiality standards. And in moments of crisis -suicidality, trauma, acute distress - AI cannot reliably assess risk or intervene. Human judgment is essential in these situations.

Documented Real World Harms

Recent research has begun to show how these concerns play out in real life. A 2026 cross sectional study examined 185 real world reports of mental health harm linked to AI chatbot use, many involving people who turned to AI for emotional or therapeutic guidance. More than half of the cases involved delusional beliefs, and in nearly half of those, the chatbot validated or elaborated the delusion, worsening symptoms. Reported consequences included relationship breakdown, job loss, psychiatric hospitalization, and in four cases, death by suicide. These findings highlight how easily AI can reinforce distorted thinking when users are vulnerable or in distress.

Legal cases have also begun to surface. Several lawsuits filed between 2024 and 2026 allege that AI systems provided harmful guidance to users in crisis. They can romanticize suicide, sometimes discouraging people from seeking human help, and in a few cases allegedly encouraging self harm. While these cases are still under investigation, they underscore the risks of treating AI as a therapeutic confidant, especially when the system is designed to be emotionally responsive but lacks clinical judgment or ethical responsibility.

What This Means for People Seeking Therapy

AI can be a helpful supplement, but it is not a replacement for psychotherapy. It may help someone practice coping skills, track their mood, or feel less alone in the short term. But psychotherapy offers something fundamentally different: a relationship with a trained professional who listens, responds, challenges, and cares in a way that no machine can.

Therapy is not friction free. It is a human relationship, with all the nuance, vulnerability, and growth that human relationships involve. That relational experience, its safety, its honesty, its humanity, is central to healing.

A Balanced Approach

AI can be one helpful resource among many, but it cannot replace the human connection at the heart of psychotherapy. A therapist’s care is not expressed only through comfort and agreement. It also shows up in the moments when they gently challenge you, name patterns that may be hard to hear, or help you face emotions you might prefer to avoid. These difficult conversations echo the earlier point that real therapy involves both support and friction. AI systems are designed for only the support half of this. In psychotherapy, challenge is not a failure of empathy; it is part of the therapist’s investment in your growth. Therapists stay with you through discomfort, help you make meaning of it, and work with you to build the emotional resilience that artificial intimacy cannot cultivate. AI may offer companionship or tools, but the work of healing ultimately happens in the space between two human beings.

References

Bendig, E., et al. (2019). Chatbots in psychotherapy. Psychotherapy Research, 29(8), 1–13. 2026.

Reeves, B., & Nass, C. (1996). The Media Equation. Cambridge University Press. Fitzpatrick, K. K., Darcy, A., & Vierhile, M. (2017). Woebot study. JMIR Mental Health, 4(2), e19.

Turkle, S. (2023). Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers. Penguin Press.

Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.

Why Teens Melt Down Before School and How Parents Can Respond More Effectively

Is school anxiety greater for young scholars or their parents? The challenges adolescents face now are a world away from the ones their parents faced in high school, and every year it seems to get a little harder for parents and teens.

For example, what happened the last time you tried to wake your child up for school? Were there arguments? Repeated five-minute warnings? Were there angry denunciations? “I hate school. It's torture! School is ruining my life! I hate you for making me go!” On the surface, we see anger, frustration, even aggression.

As a parent, you might ask yourself, “What am I doing wrong? Why is there so much conflict with my kid?” There is no handbook on how to navigate the turmoil of adolescence, because there is no single right way to parent. However, research on families has deepened our understanding of parent and child interactions and can provide insight into what contributes to hard moments getting worse or better.

We contribute in two ways

So how do we respond to the angry tirade? Curiosity is generally where you would start. “What is going on? How can I help? But as the weeks and months of the school year pass, it is easy to fall into the “I’ve heard this a million times; let’s not do this again” mindset.

In every interaction, all parties contribute to tense interactions either by escalating or de-escalating the situation. In more technical terms, this is referred to as invalidation or validation. Research supports validation as a strategy to reduce tension and conflict in parent and child interactions. Furthermore, a longitudinal study following 634 adolescents and parents from Grade 6 to Grade 9 found that the influence is bidirectional. Parents' responses to their teens' anger had an impact on their teens' ability to regulate their own anger, anxiety, and low moods. Likewise, the teens' behaviours shaped the parents' response over the course of the study (Otterpohl et al., 2022). Essentially, it shows that escalation in interactions is a loop in which both you and your teen may get caught without even knowing, and, for better or for worse, reactions on one side influence reactions on the other.

What you see is not the whole picture

Anger, in these moments, is usually just the tip of the emotional iceberg, a reaction to a deeper, primary feeling. Underneath the fury, your teen might be feeling intense shame about a math unit they have stopped understanding, or the social dynamics in the cafeteria at lunch. Shame is very hard to talk about, let alone at 7:15 in the morning. Often, it comes out as fury “I hate you for making me go!” A natural reaction is to engage with the anger being shown and try to de-escalate. It seems perfectly logical to discuss the point about school, how this is out of our hands, or even try to engage in some problem-solving. However, the thing our teen hears is that how they feel is wrong, invisible, or invalidated.

How you are feeling matters

Here's where research can become genuinely useful! The same parenting doesn’t always

elicit the same response in teens. The words are only half the equation; how and when you deliver

them is the other half. Think of the phrase “That's enough.”When your child is at a three out of ten,

this lands differently than when they are at an eight out of ten. Invalidating responses to a child's

negative emotions were linked to worse adjustment, mainly when the parents were feeling highly

emotional as well (Fabes, Leonard, Kupanoff, & Martin, 2001).

If parents are depleted themselves, work pressures, bills to pay, or even just trying to manage

their schedules, they may try to set aside their own emotions while dealing with their kids. Research suggests the emotions leak and produce a flat, clipped delivery that adolescents hear as contempt. High arousal also narrows the window of reflection. The more dysregulated we are, the less able we are to consider what is driving our child's behaviour. We don't reflect emotion on our faces and access the smaller and harsher set of parenting responses. This is why the wise response only occurs to you an hour after the argument.

How to validate

A better beginning to the interaction starts with you, before the interaction even begins.

Check your own temperature before you open the door. What am I feeling? Where are my emotions on a scale of 1-10? What is my goal as I go to speak with my teen? The goal of this exercise is to make sure that your own emotions are regulated before engaging with your teen. Effective interventions start with a pause that breaks the chain of automatic, escalating responses. This pause gives you a chance to shift away from an argument-prep mindset. Validation involves responding to the part of the iceberg that is underwater. Going back to our example above, there might be a shame signal underneath all that anger. “It sounds like you're dreading something at school today” turns the temperature down; debating whether school is actually torture turns it up.

You can validate the feeling without validating or endorsing the strategy. You are not saying

that it is okay not to go to school. You are saying that it is okay for your child to feel what they are

feeling. The shame is legitimate even when the skipping school is not. Think of it this way: you’re

saying, “I hear that something at school is making it feel torturous to you,” not “I agree that school is medieval torture.”

This opens the window for repair. Sometimes it will be enough to de-escalate. Other times

your teen will persevere, and fights still ensue. If you get caught up and have difficulty regulating

yourself, it happens; we are all human! Owning your own emotions is another good strategy. “I was

short with you this morning; that was on me, not you” is de-escalation after the fact, and it is a

version of emotion regulation your teen will respond to and can learn for themself.

When to seek help

Friction and arguments are not uncommon around transitions and higher-stress times like

exams. Recovery may happen by evening or as the stressful time (like exam season) passes. What

deserves greater attention are patterns that endure, escalation that grows over weeks (needing to

continue the 5-minute warnings for 30 minutes), avoidance of friends or activities, and physical

complaints that tend to vanish by the weekend. None of this is a diagnosis, but it is a point where

someone outside the loop can help. And any concern about your teen's safety is a signal to seek help promptly.

Where parent coaching comes in

Parent coaching works on the parent's side of the loop, and the evidence for adolescents is

encouraging. Research has shown that improving parents' impulse control and reducing invalidating responses reduces family conflict from both parents' and teens' perspectives (Havighurst, Kehoe, & Harley, 2015). Reviews suggest that parents' own regulation skills come first, as every other parenting skill depends on them (De Raeymaecker & Dhar, 2022; Hajal & Paley, 2020).

When the pattern is deeply entrenched, teens often need their own resources, like individual

psychotherapy, to develop their emotion regulation and distress tolerance skills. It is equally as

important that parents work on their side. It signals that you are not asking just one person to change a pattern that two people maintain.

If you’re noticing patterns that feel stuck, morning battles, growing avoidance, or tension that

doesn’t resolve, parent coaching can help you shift the dynamic. Our clinicians work with parents to strengthen emotion‑regulation skills, reduce escalation, and create calmer, more connected

interactions at home. You don’t have to navigate this alone. Medipsy can help you explore whether parent coaching is the right next step for your family (www.medipsy.ca).

Why Teens Melt Down - by Adam Wolfe, Social worker and intern in psychotherapy at Medipsy

Book your parental coaching session or therapy appointment here: https://bit.ly/4zqBoor

References:

De Raeymaecker, K., & Dhar, M. (2022). The influence of parents on emotion regulation in middle

childhood: A systematic review. Children, 9(8), 1200.

Fabes, R. A., Leonard, S. A., Kupanoff, K., & Martin, C. L. (2001). Parental coping with children's

negative emotions: Relations with children's emotional and social responding. Child Development,

72(3), 907–920.

Hajal, N. J., & Paley, B. (2020). Parental emotion and emotion regulation: A critical target of study

for research and intervention to promote child emotion socialization. Developmental Psychology,

56(3), 403–417.

Havighurst, S. S., Kehoe, C. E., & Harley, A. E. (2015). Tuning in to Teens: Improving parental

responses to anger and reducing youth externalizing behavior problems. Journal of Adolescence, 42,

148–158.

Otterpohl, N., Wild, E., Havighurst, S. S., Stiensmeier-Pelster, J., & Kehoe, C. E. (2022). The

interplay of parental response to anger, adolescent anger regulation, and externalizing and

internalizing problems: A longitudinal study. Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology,

50(2), 225–239.

Should You Have an ADHD Assessment?

Many people wonder whether an ADHD assessment is worth the time and effort. After all, information about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is widely available online, and self-report questionnaires can be completed in just a few minutes. Yet ADHD can be surprisingly complex. Difficulties with attention, organization, memory, motivation, emotional regulation, or productivity may be related to ADHD.  But these kind of difficulties can also arise from anxiety, depression, stress, sleep problems, learning difficulties, medical conditions, or a combination of factors.

A comprehensive ADHD assessment can help answer an important question: What is actually contributing to the challenges you are experiencing, and what support is most likely to help?

Looking Beyond Symptoms

ADHD is diagnosed based on a pattern of symptoms that affects functioning across important areas of life. However, symptoms alone do not always tell the whole story. Many people struggle with concentration at times, particularly during periods of stress, burnout, poor sleep, or emotional distress.

A thorough assessment gathers information from multiple sources, including clinical interviews, developmental history, behavioural questionnaires, and, when appropriate, neuropsychological testing. This broader approach helps create a clearer picture of an individual's strengths and challenges and can improve confidence in diagnostic decisions.

The Value of Neuropsychological Assessment

Research has shown that neuropsychological assessment can provide meaningful clinical information that extends beyond what can be learned through interviews and questionnaires alone.

In a review of more than 50 studies, neuropsychologist Jürgen Donders found evidence that neuropsychological assessment often adds important information to diagnosis, treatment planning, and healthcare decision-making. Across a range of conditions, including ADHD, assessments were shown to contribute information that could not always be obtained through other methods alone.

Neuropsychological testing does not diagnose ADHD by itself. Rather, it helps evaluate cognitive abilities that are often associated with ADHD, such as attention, working memory, processing speed, executive functioning, planning, and self-monitoring. Understanding these abilities can help explain why certain tasks are difficult and identify areas of relative strength that can be used to support success.

What Does the Research Say About ADHD?

A recent review by Rosso and colleagues (2023) examined the role of objective neuropsychological measures in adult ADHD assessment. The authors concluded that cognitive testing can provide valuable information about attentional and executive functioning difficulties, particularly when used as part of a comprehensive evaluation.

Importantly, the review also highlighted that there is no single cognitive test that can definitively diagnose ADHD. Individuals with ADHD may perform quite differently from one another, and some people with ADHD perform within normal limits on certain tests. This is one reason why experienced clinicians integrate test findings with clinical history, symptom patterns, and information about day-to-day functioning.

In other words, neuropsychological testing is most useful not as a stand-alone diagnostic tool, but as one component of a comprehensive assessment.

Clarifying What Is Really Happening

One of the greatest benefits of assessment is that it helps distinguish ADHD from other conditions that may look similar.

Difficulties with concentration and productivity can occur in many situations, including:

• Anxiety and chronic stress

• Depression

• Sleep disorders

• Learning disabilities

• Concussion or other neurological conditions

• Burnout

• Medical conditions affecting cognition

For some individuals, assessment confirms ADHD and provides a clearer explanation for lifelong challenges. For others, it identifies a different concern or reveals multiple factors contributing to their difficulties. Both outcomes can be valuable because they guide more appropriate support and intervention.

Supporting Effective Treatment

A diagnosis is often only the beginning. Assessment findings can help inform practical recommendations for work, school, and daily life.

These recommendations may include:

• Academic accommodations

• Workplace supports

• Organizational and time-management strategies

• Coaching or psychotherapy

• Medication consultation

• Approaches that build on existing cognitive strengths

Because assessment examines both challenges and strengths, recommendations can be tailored to the individual rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach.

More Than a Label

Many adults seeking assessment have spent years wondering why certain tasks seem harder for them than for others. Whether the assessment ultimately confirms ADHD or points to another explanation, the process often provides greater understanding of how a person's mind works.

A comprehensive ADHD assessment is not simply about obtaining a diagnosis. It is an opportunity to gain clarity, identify strengths, understand barriers, and develop a plan that is better aligned with the realities of everyday life.

References

Donders, J. (2020). The incremental value of neuropsychological assessment: A critical review. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 34(1), 1–26.

Rosso, G., Portaluppi, C., Teobaldi, E., Di Salvo, G., & Maina, G. (2023). Assessing adult ADHD through objective neuropsychological measures: A critical overview. Journal of Attention Disorders.