Dear ImPatient subscriber,

I hope you are enjoying the summer, but I know many are struggling.

AI mental health self-help tools are growing fast - I’ve used AI myself for support with my own mental health problems. But protection for the people using them isn't keeping pace.

This growing gap is precisely why I’ve worked with the Centre for Mental Health to produce Unequal benefits, unequal harms, a discussion paper on AI mental health chatbots, inequality and the risks of self-guided care. READ HERE

The paper finds people’s use of AI to support mental health has outpaced the development of robust mechanisms to mitigate problems. Oversight is uncoordinated, and there are significant gaps in evidence, accountability and patient safety.

While these tools may improve access and affordability for some, the paper warns that the benefits won't be distributed evenly - and that the risks of generative AI mental health systems are likely to fall disproportionately on people who are already vulnerable. Large language models can also absorb and repeat patterns of structural discrimination, reinforcing stereotypes or invalidating certain identities.

There's also a data gap: we don't know enough about who is using these tools across different demographic and socioeconomic groups, including in relation to deprivation, ethnicity, disability, neurodiversity, severe mental illness and experiences of trauma.

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