More than 5 million adolescents and young adults in the United States have sought mental health advice from generative artificial intelligence (AI), according to a study
published today in
JAMA Network Open.
Ryan K. McBain, Ph.D., M.P.H., of the RAND Corp., and colleagues surveyed 1,058 youth between the ages of 12 and 21 (50% female, 13% Black, 25% Hispanic, 51% White) from February to March 2025. The survey asked respondents:
- If they had ever used generative AI for any reason
- If they had sought advice or help from generative AI when feeling sad, angry, or nervous
- How often they sought such mental health advice
- The perceived helpfulness of the advice.
What were the results?
A total of 13% of respondents reported using generative AI for mental health advice—which would extrapolate to about 5.4 million youth ages 12 to 21 nationwide. Of those who used AI for advice, 66% sought such advice monthly or more frequently, and 92% found the advice to be somewhat or very helpful.
Individuals between the ages of 18 and 21 were about four times as likely to use generative AI for mental health advice compared with younger adolescents—though the authors noted that these findings should be interpreted with caution because the sample size of this older group was small (147 respondents).
Black respondents reported lower perceived helpfulness than their White counterparts, “signaling potential cultural competency gaps,” the authors wrote.
What does it mean?
“[These] high use rates likely reflect the low cost, immediacy, and perceived privacy of AI-based advice, particularly for youths unlikely to receive traditional counseling,” the study authors wrote. “However, engagement with generative AI raises concerns, especially for users with intensive clinical needs.”
In a RAND
news release, study author Jonathan Cantor, Ph.D., noted: “There are few standardized benchmarks for evaluating mental health advice offered by AI chatbots, and there is limited transparency about the datasets that are used to train these large language models.”
(Image: Getty Images/iStock/Thai Liang Lim)