Can ChatGPT be a support for your mental health? This question is a sticky one, dividing therapists and technologists alike. If you want my quick answer, it's this: yes, it can be a surprisingly powerful tool for reflection, but you must be incredibly careful. It is not, and never can be, a replacement for therapy.
As a therapist in Paris, I've spent the last year experimenting with Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. My approach has been one of cautious curiosity. I love new technology, but I'm wary of anything that promises easy answers to complex human problems.
In this post, I want to share my honest perspective, based on real-world experiments — from my classroom to a rather wild confrontation with an internet troll. This is not a piece by a tech evangelist or a luddite, but a practical guide from a working therapist on how you can — and can't — use AI for psychological growth.
Let's start with a story that surprised me and revealed the true power of these tools. Over Christmas, I was experimenting with the publishing platform Substack. A post by another author went viral for all the wrong reasons: it was a chilling, cleverly coded essay by a man in his late 40s about his attraction to teenage girls.
As a professional writer, he was a master of using language to hide his intentions. Every sentence felt deeply creepy, but it was difficult to pinpoint exactly why. The comment section was on fire. People were rightly calling him out, but their emotional and often scattered responses were only feeding him. He was a classic internet troll, thriving on the conflict he was so skilled at creating.
I was bothered by it, but I had no desire to engage with him directly. So I wondered: could ChatGPT do it for me?
I copy-pasted his essay and his manipulative comments into the AI. I asked it a simple question: "What do you think of this?"
What came back was a stunningly clear and comprehensive deconstruction of the man's behavior. The AI identified the specific rhetorical tactics he was using — DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender), moving goalposts, feigned intellectualism — and tied each one to concrete examples from his writing. It was a perfect, clinical analysis of his manipulation.
So, I posted the AI's report in the comments. His response was to try and charm me, then to try and discredit the AI. Each time, I fed his response back into ChatGPT, asking it to analyze his new strategy. The AI calmly dismantled his arguments, one by one. Eventually, after claiming to be an advocate for free speech who would argue with anyone, he blocked me.
This experience taught me a profound lesson: ChatGPT's greatest strength is its ability to see and articulate patterns in language, divorced from emotion. It is a powerful tool for deconstructing how people use words to hide, harm, and manipulate.
This capacity to analyze language makes ChatGPT a potentially brilliant tool for self-reflection. If you keep a journal, you can use the AI as a kind of "journaling coach."
I've done this with my own writing. I've fed it passages and asked direct questions:
What patterns in my thinking do you notice here?
Do you see any potential blind spots in how I'm describing this situation?
Based on my writing, can you provide me with new reflective questions to explore this topic more deeply?
The insights it has fed back to me have been remarkable. While they haven't been shocking revelations, I've been highly impressed by the clarity with which it identifies my core thought patterns. If I had seen this kind of analysis of my own thinking at 25, it would have been game-changing.
This is where my caution becomes a firm boundary. There are prompts circulating online designed to make ChatGPT adopt the persona of a therapist — often a "tough love" psychologist who tells you the "brutal truth."
I've tested these, and the results are deeply concerning. The AI will give you a list of "truths" about yourself. Much of it might feel shockingly accurate, gleaned from the data you've fed it. But some of it will be wrong, or half-right, yet it will be presented with absolute, declarative authority: "This is you."
A younger, more impressionable person may not have the life experience or self-awareness to distinguish the accurate insights from the harmful inaccuracies. This is a huge risk.
Furthermore, therapy is not about being handed a list of your flaws. What ChatGPT does is throw "truth bombs" at you, one after another, without context or care. This can be a destructive experience. Real therapeutic work is the slow, supported journey of uncovering these truths for yourself, in a safe relationship where you can process the emotional fallout and integrate the new awareness. Information without a safe space for integration is not healing; it's just more pain.
So, should you use ChatGPT for mental health support?
Here's my final take: as a Journaling Coach, it has powerful and surprising potential. Use it to analyze your own writing and reflect on your own patterns, but always hold its conclusions lightly.
As a therapist, I would give a hard no. It is a risky and potentially harmful shortcut. It can deliver information, but it cannot deliver the safety, wisdom, or human connection that makes healing possible. There are simply some jobs that should never be outsourced to a machine. This, I believe, is one of them. For now.
Can ChatGPT be a support for your mental health? This question is a sticky one, dividing therapists and technologists alike. If you want my quick answer, it's this: yes, it can be a surprisingly powerful tool for reflection, but you must be incredibly careful. It is not, and never can be, a replacement for therapy.
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