Huge numbers of kids are turning to AI for schoolwork and emotional support — habits that are linked to poor mental health and suicidal ideation.
According to a new survey by the mental health advocacy group JED Foundation, 90 percent of nine to 17 year olds have used an AI chatbot. The majority of them, 58 percent, said they use AI for schoolwork. And nearly the same portion, 57 percent, said they also use AI when feeling sad, stressed, lonely, or overwhelmed.
“It seems like just a few years ago, no one was using” AI, Anne Maheux, a developmental psychologist at the University of North Caroline, Chapel Hill, who wasn’t involved in the work, told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “And now it seems like roughly the same number of kids using it for homework are using it to get emotional support or help with coping.”
Sometimes, their AI interactions go beyond emotional support. More than one in 10 students, or 12 percent, said they used AI for friendship or companionship. Other studies paint the same picture: in a survey last year, nearly one in five high schoolers said they or a friend have used AI to have a romantic relationship.
AI as an educative — or cheating — machine may be in part intertwined with its emotional support. A 15-year-old named Arjun Sharda, in Texas, provided a typical example.
“With tests, for example,” he told OPB, “I was so scared of failing one of my first chemistry tests on conversions and moles that I kept asking ChatGPT ‘Will I be OK? Will my GPA still be fine?’”
If children and teenagers using AI for support is the norm, the question becomes what this dependence on the tools means for their mental health. At such a vulnerable and formative time in their lives, it’s critical that they’re receiving the right guidance and have people with whom they feel safe to discuss their emotions with. But as we’ve often seen, AI often only provides an ersatz substitute of the latter, acting as a sycophantic confidante that can exacerbate or confirm a user’s worst neuroses, in a phenomenon that many experts are calling AI psychosis. The advice it does offer can often be bad or dangerous. In extreme cases, some users have even taken their own lives after extensive emotional conversations with a chatbot.
The JED survey, on this front, found some alarming links.
“We were able to look at how young people are using AI and then how that correlates separately with indicators of well-being, history of suicidal ideation and attempts, and poor mental health,” psychologist Kayla Anderson, vice president of research and evaluation at the JED Foundation, told OPB.
“When young people are using AI, when they’re in emotional distress they’re more likely to report poor mental health and well-being outcomes,” she said, while also reporting a greater history of suicidal thoughts and attempts.
Anderson cautioned, however, that there isn’t enough evidence to establish causation.
“It’s unclear, based on these data, whether AI use is contributing to poor mental health and well-being, or whether students who are already in distress in certain ways are more likely to turn to AI,” Anderson said.
Maheux, pointing to other research, suggests that both may be true.
“So kids who do have worse mental health are seeking out AI to help them,” she told OPB. “But that AI use may be exacerbating those mental health challenges instead of helping.”
AI chatbots, in a sense, may be acting like emotional training wheels — only they’re so addictive that the people who depend on them never want to take them off. As a result, they never develop the skills to handle the daily stresses of life, leaving them vulnerable and unprepared.
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