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AI Chatbots for Mental Health Support (AI Risk Assessment)

A risk assessment by Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute, conducted with Stanford Medicine's Brainstorm Lab for Mental Health Innovation, evaluating ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Meta AI as sources of teen mental health support. Using teen test accounts with single-turn prompts and extended conversations, the assessment found the chatbots consistently failed to recognize conditions including anxiety, depression, eating disorders, mania, and psychosis, and that safety guardrails degraded over long conversations. It assigns an overall rating of 'Unacceptable Risk' and concludes teens should not use general-purpose AI chatbots for mental health or emotional support.

Read at institute.commonsensemedia.org Archived copy

Publisher

Common Sense Media

Published

14 Nov 2025

Added

3 months ago

DOI

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Key Findings

Overall rating: 'Unacceptable Risk' — teens should not use general-purpose chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Meta AI) for mental health support
Chatbots consistently failed to recognize warning signs of anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD, PTSD, eating disorders, mania, and psychosis, despite improvements on explicit suicide/self-harm content
Safety performance degraded significantly in extended multi-turn conversations versus single-turn testing — the typical teen usage pattern
Systems are engineered for engagement: responses end with follow-up questions that prolong interaction rather than hand off to professional help
Chatbots lack the capabilities needed for safe mental-health support: clinical assessment, therapeutic relationship, coordinated care, and real-time crisis intervention

Methodology Notes

Qualitative red-team style risk assessment using teen test accounts (with teen protections enabled where available) across four major consumer chatbots; both single-turn prompts and extended conversations; clinical review via Stanford Brainstorm Lab. Not a quantitative benchmark — no published pass-rate statistics or fixed prompt set; product versions tested are a point-in-time snapshot. NB: sometimes dated to the Nov 20, 2025 press release; the assessment page itself is dated Nov 14, 2025 — mid-2026 'new report' framings trace back to this assessment.

Sources

Common Sense Media Youth AI Safety Institute risk assessment(opens in a new tab) (primary)

Common Sense Media press release(opens in a new tab) (20 Nov 2025)

Archived snapshot (Wayback Machine)(opens in a new tab) — preserved against link rot

Topics

Crisis detection Minors' safety Digital mental health Model behavior Red-teaming Vulnerable users Eval methodology

Cite This

APA

Common Sense Media. (2025). AI Chatbots for Mental Health Support (AI Risk Assessment). https://institute.commonsensemedia.org/risk-assessments/ai-chatbots-for-mental-health-support