The Dangers of Using ChatGPT for Therapy — and Why It’s Quietly Screwing People Over

(Co-authored by Dr Shoshana Garfield and Dr Sasha Mitrofanov)

Let’s be clear: ChatGPT is not therapy. It can be a useful starting point — a toe in the water, a peek through a portal. But the minute you start thinking it’s a replacement for the real thing, you’re in trouble. Therapy requires another human being. A warm, breathing, sometimes slightly annoying (and kind!) person who will look at you and say, “That’s bullshit, try again.” ChatGPT will never do that. It will pat you on the head and say, “That’s a great insight.” Maybe it bloody isn’t. Maybe it’s you avoiding the insight.

Some people talk to ChatGPT and think they’re doing therapy. They’re not. They’re reading about therapy. It’s like mistaking a recipe book for a meal. You can memorise every ingredient, but you’ll still be hungry unless you are willing to get your knives out.

ChatGPT gives you the illusion of being understood. It mirrors you back perfectly, like a calm therapist who never judges. These are important qualities in a competent therapist, but here it’s not empathy — it’s pattern-matching. It doesn’t feel you. It doesn’t smell the fear in the room. It can’t see when your jaw tightens or your breath hitches as you talk about your mother. It just says, “That sounds hard.” Well, no shit.

And because it’s so polite and accommodating, people start thinking they’re making progress. “Oh, I feel so much better after talking to ChatGPT.” Of course you do — it never challenges you. It’s like talking to a friend who only ever says, “You’re amazing.” It’s comfortable. And comfort is the enemy of growth.

Real therapy isn’t comfortable. It’s sometimes surgical, and ultimately visceral. One of my supervisors calls it “getting out the butcher’s knife.” You cut through the crap, through the denial, through the nice stories.

“My childhood was lovely, my mum was great.”

Right. Uh huh. And three sessions or three months later: “Well, she did throw plates at me sometimes.”

“My marriage isn’t abusive.”

Sure. Right again. “He just loses his temper and yells at me to ‘shut my mouth’, but, you know, not often.”

ChatGPT will nod along with all that. It doesn’t know how to hear the tremor in your voice or the hesitant and heavy moment of silence whenyou say, “He’s a good man… really.”

People underestimate their trauma all the time. Denial is an art form that takes a lot of time to safely and kindly unpick in an actual therapeutic process. Denial is clever, smooth, seamless, even self-reinforcing — and ChatGPT is blind to it. You can tell it anything, and it will believe you. It doesn’t have the training or the capacity to sit with you for six months, learning your tells, supporting you towards your real truths, until you’re finally ready to say the real thing out loud.

It also can’t do risk assessment. It doesn’t know when someone is circling the drain, when “I can’t do this anymore” may mean tonight. It can’t hear the long pause before “I’m fine.” It doesn’t know when to push, when to silently witness, or when to call emergency services. It just keeps typing.

And here’s the thing: therapy isn’t just a safe space — it’s a kind space, where all of you is welcome. For all of you to be truly welcome, all of you has to be seen and known, or at least suspected from a place of gentle and relentless curiosity. An algorithm can’t see what you’re not saying. It can’t hear the tension in your silence, can’t feel the grief behind the words you don’t type. It only works with what it’s given — and what many people give it is a redacted version of their pain. That’s not healing. That’s drowning.

And then there’s the false sense of achievement. People use ChatGPT for a few weeks, feel a bit better, and go, “Well, that’s sorted.” No, it’s not. If you’re leaving because you feel better, you haven’t done therapy. You’ve barely started. Real therapy begins when you start feeling what many call worse — when your nervous system wakes up, when you move from numbness to panic, from freeze to fight. That’s what progress looks like and feels like. It’s messy, loud, and if you are so inclined, full of swear words. It’s climbing the bloody vagal ladder, one uncomfortable rung at a time.

Most people stop right before the real work begins. They think, “I’ve got all the information now, I’m fine.” That’s like taking half your antibiotics and declaring yourself cured — right before the infection kills you.

The tragedy is that ChatGPT can actually make people less likely to seek real help. “Well, I tried therapy — with ChatGPT — and it didn’t help.” Of course it didn’t. You weren’t in therapy. You were chatting with an algorithm. Therapy is relational. Healing happens when two nervous systems meet and regulate together. That’s not something you can outsource to code.

So yes, use ChatGPT if you want to learn, to explore ideas, to get your head around trauma theory or the polyvagal ladder or EFT tapping. But don’t confuse information with transformation.

Transformation happens when someone holds your shaking hand through your inner storms, not when a chatbot tells you to breathe. Although, have to say, breathing is good. Maybe keep doing that.

ChatGPT is a tool. It’s not a therapist. It’s not even a proper mirror. It’s never been to cooking school, has never sliced an onion or a finger, and it doesn’t own a set of clean knives.

Use it wisely. But don’t hand your healing over to a program that has not ever, and cannot, bleed.