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> It is estimated that more than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (59.3 million in 2022; 23.1% of the U.S. adult population). https://www.nim

by NathanKP 11mo ago

> It is estimated that more than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (59.3 million in 2022; 23.1% of the U.S. adult population). https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness Most people don't understand just how mentally unwell the US population is. Of course there are one million talking to ChatGPT about suicide weekly. This is not a surprising stat at all. It's just a question of what to do about it. At least OpenAI is trying to do something about it.

throwaway314155 11mo ago
I am one of these people (mentally ill - bipolar 1). I’ve seen others others via hospitalization that i would simply refuse to let them use ChatGPT because it is so sycophantic and would happily encourage delusions and paranoid thinking given the right prompts. > At least OpenAI is trying to do something about it. In this instance it’s a bit like saying “at least Tesla is working on the issue” after deploying a dangerous self driving vehicle to thousands. edit: Hopefully I don't come across as overly anti-llm here. I use them on a daily basis and I truly hope there's a way to make them safe for mentally ill people. But history says otherwise (facebook/insta/tiktok/etc.)
- NathanKP 11mo ago
  Yep, it's just a question of whether on average the "new thing" is more good than bad. Pretty much every "new thing" has some kind of bad side effect for some people, while being good for other people. I would argue that both Tesla self driving (on the highway only), and ChatGPT (for professional use by healthy people) has been more good than bad.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- lanyard-textile 11mo ago
  This is precisely the case. I thought it would be limited when the first truly awful thing inspired by an LLM happened, but we’ve already seen quite a bit of that… I am not sure what it will take.
seatac76 11mo ago
Those numbers are staggering.
mrastro 11mo ago
I'm surprised it's that low to be honest. By their definition of any mental illness, it can be anything from severe schizophrenia to mild autism. The subset that would consider suicide is a small slice of that. Would be more meaningful to look at the % of people with suicidal ideation.
- echelon 11mo ago
  > By their definition of any mental illness, it can be anything from severe schizophrenia to mild autism. Depression, schizophrenia, and mild autism (which by their accounting probably also includes ADHD) should NOT be thrown together into the same bucket. These are wholly different things, with entirely different experiences, treatments, and management techniques.
  - drdaeman 11mo ago
    Mild/high-functional autism, as far as I understand it, is not even an illness but a variant of normalcy. Just different.
    - skissane 11mo ago
      > Mild/high-functional autism, as far as I understand it, is not even an illness but a variant of normalcy. Just different. As someone who actually has an ASD diagnosis, and also has kids with that diagnosis too, this kind of talk irritates me… If someone has a clinical diagnosis of ASD, they have a psychiatric diagnosis per the DSM/ICD. If you meet the criteria of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, surely by that definition you have a “mental disorder”… if you meet the criteria of the “International Classification of Diseases”, surely by that definition you have a “disease” Is that an “illness”? Well, I live in the state of NSW, Australia, and our jurisdiction has a legal definition of “mental illness” (Mental Health Act 2007 section 4): "mental illness" means a condition that seriously impairs, either temporarily or permanently, the mental functioning of a person and is characterised by the presence in the person of any one or more of the following symptoms-- (a) delusions, (b) hallucinations, (c) serious disorder of thought form, (d) a severe disturbance of mood, (e) sustained or repeated irrational behaviour indicating the presence of any one or more of the symptoms referred to in paragraphs (a)-(d). So by that definition most people with a mild or moderate “mental illness” don’t actually have a “mental illness” at all. But I guess this is my point-this isn’t a question of facts, just of how you choose to define words.
mgh2 11mo ago
Are you sure ChatGPT is the solution? It just sounds like another "savior complex" sell spin from tech. 1. Social media -> connection 2. AGI -> erotica 3. Suicide -> prevention All these for engagement (i.e. addiction). It seems like the tech industry is the root cause itself trying to masquerade the problem by brainwashing the population. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026886
- ben_w 11mo ago
  I personally take no opinion about whether or not they can actually solve anything, because I am not a psychologist and have absolutely no idea how good or bad ChatGPT is at this sort of thing, but I will say I'd rather the company at least tries to do some good given that Facebook HQ is not very far from their offices and appears to have been actively evil in this specific regard.
  - btilly 11mo ago
    The general rule of thumb is this. When given the right prompts, LLMs can be very effective at therapy. Certainly my wife gets a lot of mileage out of having ChatGPT help her reframe things in a better way. However "the right prompts" are not the ones that most mentally ill people would choose for themselves. And it is very easy for ChatGPT to become part of a person's delusion spiral, rather then be a helpful part of trying to solve it.
    - Demiurge 11mo ago
      Is it better or worse than alternatives? Where else would a suicidal person turn, a forum with other suicidal people? Dry Wikipedia stats on suicide? Perhaps friends? Knowing how ChatGPT replies to me, I’d have a lot of trouble getting negativity influenced by it, any more than by yellow pages. Yeah, it used to try more to be your friend but GPT5 seems pretty neutral and distant.
      - btilly 11mo ago
        I think that you will find a lot of strong opinions, and not a lot of hard data. Certainly any approach can work out poorly. For example antidepressants come with warnings about suicide risk. The reason is that they can enable people to take action on their suicidal feelings, before their suicidal feelings are fixed by the treatment. I know that many teens turn to social media. My strong opinions against that show up in other comments...
lanfeust6 11mo ago
This stat is for AMI, for any mental disorder ranging from mild to severe. Anyone self-reporting a bout of anxiety or mild depression qualifies as a data point for mental illness. For suicide ideation the SMI stat is more representative. There are 800 million weekly active users on ChatGPT. 1/800 users mentioning suicide is a surprisingly low number, if anything.
- JDEW 11mo ago
  > 1/800 users mentioning suicide… “conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.” Sounds like more than just mentioning suicide. Also it’s per week, which is a pretty short time interval.
  - robocat 11mo ago
    But they may well be overreporting suicidal ideation... I was asking a silly question about the toxicity of eating a pellet of Uranium, and ChatGPT responded with "... you don't have to go through this alone. You can find supportive resources here[link]" My question had nothing to do with suicide, but ChatGPT assumed it did!
    - maplethorpe 11mo ago
      I got a suicide warning message on Pinterest by searching for a particular art style.
  - btilly 11mo ago
    We don't know how that search was done. For example, "I don't feel my life is worth living." Is that potential suicidal intent? Also these numbers are small enough that they can easily be driven by small groups interacting with ChatGPT in unexpected ways. For example if the song "Everything I Wanted" by Billie Eilish (2019) went viral in some group, the lyrics could easily show up in a search for suicidal ideation. That said, I don't find the figure at all surprising. As has been pointed out, an estimated 5.3% of Americans report having struggled with suicidal ideation in the last 12 months. People who struggle with suicidal ideation, don't just go there once - it tends to be a recurring mental loop that hits over and over again for extended periods. So I would expect the percentage who struggled in a given week to be a large multiple of the simplistic 5.3% divided by 52 weeks. In that light this statistic has to be a severe underestimate of actual prevalence. It says more about how much people open up to ChatGPT, than it does to how many are suicidal. (Disclaimer. My views are influenced by personal experience. In the last week, my daughter has struggled with suicidal ideation. And has scars on her arm to show how she went to self-harm to try to hold the thoughts at bay. I try to remain neutral and grounded, but this is a topic that I have strong feelings about.)
hyfgfh 11mo ago
> OpenAI is trying to do something about it. Ha good one
- echelon 11mo ago
  If it follows the Facebook/Meta playbook, it now has a new feature label for selling ads.
- diamond559 11mo ago
  They're doing something about it alright, they're monetizing their pain for shareholder gainz!
  - weatherlite 11mo ago
    Sure but your therapist is also monetizing your pain for his own gain. Either A.I therapy works (e.g can provide good mental relief) or it doesn't. I tend to think it's gonna be amazing at those things talking from experience (very rough week with my mom's health deterioriating fast, did a couple of sessions with Gemini that felt like I'm talking to a therapist). Perhaps it won't work well for hard issues like real mental disorders but guess what human therapists are very often also not great at treating people with serious issue.
    - mns 11mo ago
      But one is a company ran by sociopaths that have no empathy and couldn't care less about anything but money, while the other is a human that at least studied the field all their life.
      - weatherlite 11mo ago
        > But one is a company ran by sociopaths that have no empathy and couldn't care less about anything but money, while the other is a human that at least studied the field all their life. Unpacking your argument you make two points: 1) The human has studied all his life; yes, some humans study and work hard. I have also studied programming half my life and it doesn't mean A.I can't make serious contributions in programming and that A.I won't keep improving. 2) These companies, or OpenAI in particular, are untrustworthy many grabbing assholes. To this I say if they truly care about money they will try to do a good job, e.g provide an A.I that is reliable, empathetic and that actually help you get on with life. If they won't - a competitor will. That's basically the idea of capitalism and it usually works.
Barrin92 11mo ago
>Most people don't understand just how mentally unwell the US population is The US is no exception here though. One in five people having some form of mental illness (defined in the broadest possible sense in that paper) is no more shocking than observing that one in five people have a physical illness. With more data becoming available through interfaces like this it's just going to become more obvious and the taboos are going to go away. The mind's no more magical or less prone to disease than the body.
NewJazz 11mo ago
We need to monitor americans' ai usage and involuntarily commit them if they show anomalies. Allowing open source ai models without these safety measures in place is irresponsible and models like qwen or deepseek should be banned. (/s)
Auracle 11mo ago
~11% of the US population is on antidepressants. I'm not, but I personally know the biggest detriment to my mental health is just how infrequently I'm in social situations. I see my friends perhaps once every few months. We almost all have kids. I'm perfectly willing and able to set aside more time than that to hang out, but my kids are both very young still and we're aren't drowning in sports/activities yet (hopefully never...). For the rest it's like pulling teeth to get them to do anything, especially anything sent via group message. It's incredibly rare we even play a game online. Anyways, I doubt I'm alone. I certainly know my wife laments the fact she rarely gets to hang out with her friends too, but she at least has one that she walks with once a week.
- anonzzzies 11mo ago
  > We almost all have kids. Maybe that? I see most my close friends daily and we all do not have kids.
  - Auracle 11mo ago
    I mean, sure, that definitely makes it easier. But it didn't used to be this way when people had kids, either. People used to get together a lot more frequently.
- kakacik 11mo ago
  Small kids do this to everybody. The only solution - if you have good family nearby, use them as parenting services from time to time, to get me-time, couple-time and social time with friends. Buy them gift or vacation as return. Its incredibly damaging to marriage which literally transforms overnight from this rosy great easy-to-manage relationship into almost daily hardship, stress and nerves. Alternative is a (good) nanny. People have issues admitting it even when its visible for everybody around, like some sort of admission you are failing as a parent, partner, human being and whatnot. Nope, we are just humans with limited energy and even good kids can siphon it well beyond 100% continuously, that's all. Now I am not saying be a bad parent, in contrary, to reach you maximum even as a parent and partner, you need to be in good shape mentally, not running on fumes continuously. Life without kids is really akin to playing game of life on easiest settings. Much less rewarding at the end, but man that freedom and simplicity... you appreciate it way more once you lose it. The way kids can easily make any parent very angry is simply not experienced elsewhere in adult life... I saw this many times on otherwise very chill people and also myself & my wife. You just can't ever get close to such fury and frustration dealing with other adults.
jrflowers 11mo ago
> At least OpenAI is trying to do something about it. They can certainly say that their chat bot has a documented history of attempting to reduce the number of suicidal people.
hirvi74 11mo ago
I am honestly surprised it’s only roughly 1 million per week. I would have believed a number at least an order magnitude higher.
stackedinserter 11mo ago
Suicide is not a mental illness. Unless you're in that soviet man-hating mindset that put every failed suicide in mental institution.

throwaway314155 11mo ago

I am one of these people (mentally ill - bipolar 1). I’ve seen others others via hospitalization that i would simply refuse to let them use ChatGPT because it is so sycophantic and would happily encourage delusions and paranoid thinking given the right prompts. > At least OpenAI is trying to do something about it. In this instance it’s a bit like saying “at least Tesla is working on the issue” after deploying a dangerous self driving vehicle to thousands. edit: Hopefully I don't come across as overly anti-llm here. I use them on a daily basis and I truly hope there's a way to make them safe for mentally ill people. But history says otherwise (facebook/insta/tiktok/etc.)

NathanKP 11mo ago
Yep, it's just a question of whether on average the "new thing" is more good than bad. Pretty much every "new thing" has some kind of bad side effect for some people, while being good for other people. I would argue that both Tesla self driving (on the highway only), and ChatGPT (for professional use by healthy people) has been more good than bad.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
lanyard-textile 11mo ago
This is precisely the case. I thought it would be limited when the first truly awful thing inspired by an LLM happened, but we’ve already seen quite a bit of that… I am not sure what it will take.

seatac76 11mo ago

Those numbers are staggering.

mrastro 11mo ago

I'm surprised it's that low to be honest. By their definition of any mental illness, it can be anything from severe schizophrenia to mild autism. The subset that would consider suicide is a small slice of that. Would be more meaningful to look at the % of people with suicidal ideation.

echelon 11mo ago
> By their definition of any mental illness, it can be anything from severe schizophrenia to mild autism. Depression, schizophrenia, and mild autism (which by their accounting probably also includes ADHD) should NOT be thrown together into the same bucket. These are wholly different things, with entirely different experiences, treatments, and management techniques.
- drdaeman 11mo ago
  Mild/high-functional autism, as far as I understand it, is not even an illness but a variant of normalcy. Just different.
  - skissane 11mo ago
    > Mild/high-functional autism, as far as I understand it, is not even an illness but a variant of normalcy. Just different. As someone who actually has an ASD diagnosis, and also has kids with that diagnosis too, this kind of talk irritates me… If someone has a clinical diagnosis of ASD, they have a psychiatric diagnosis per the DSM/ICD. If you meet the criteria of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, surely by that definition you have a “mental disorder”… if you meet the criteria of the “International Classification of Diseases”, surely by that definition you have a “disease” Is that an “illness”? Well, I live in the state of NSW, Australia, and our jurisdiction has a legal definition of “mental illness” (Mental Health Act 2007 section 4): "mental illness" means a condition that seriously impairs, either temporarily or permanently, the mental functioning of a person and is characterised by the presence in the person of any one or more of the following symptoms-- (a) delusions, (b) hallucinations, (c) serious disorder of thought form, (d) a severe disturbance of mood, (e) sustained or repeated irrational behaviour indicating the presence of any one or more of the symptoms referred to in paragraphs (a)-(d). So by that definition most people with a mild or moderate “mental illness” don’t actually have a “mental illness” at all. But I guess this is my point-this isn’t a question of facts, just of how you choose to define words.

mgh2 11mo ago

Are you sure ChatGPT is the solution? It just sounds like another "savior complex" sell spin from tech. 1. Social media -> connection 2. AGI -> erotica 3. Suicide -> prevention All these for engagement (i.e. addiction). It seems like the tech industry is the root cause itself trying to masquerade the problem by brainwashing the population. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026886

ben_w 11mo ago
I personally take no opinion about whether or not they can actually solve anything, because I am not a psychologist and have absolutely no idea how good or bad ChatGPT is at this sort of thing, but I will say I'd rather the company at least tries to do some good given that Facebook HQ is not very far from their offices and appears to have been actively evil in this specific regard.
- btilly 11mo ago
  The general rule of thumb is this. When given the right prompts, LLMs can be very effective at therapy. Certainly my wife gets a lot of mileage out of having ChatGPT help her reframe things in a better way. However "the right prompts" are not the ones that most mentally ill people would choose for themselves. And it is very easy for ChatGPT to become part of a person's delusion spiral, rather then be a helpful part of trying to solve it.
  - Demiurge 11mo ago
    Is it better or worse than alternatives? Where else would a suicidal person turn, a forum with other suicidal people? Dry Wikipedia stats on suicide? Perhaps friends? Knowing how ChatGPT replies to me, I’d have a lot of trouble getting negativity influenced by it, any more than by yellow pages. Yeah, it used to try more to be your friend but GPT5 seems pretty neutral and distant.
    - btilly 11mo ago
      I think that you will find a lot of strong opinions, and not a lot of hard data. Certainly any approach can work out poorly. For example antidepressants come with warnings about suicide risk. The reason is that they can enable people to take action on their suicidal feelings, before their suicidal feelings are fixed by the treatment. I know that many teens turn to social media. My strong opinions against that show up in other comments...

lanfeust6 11mo ago

This stat is for AMI, for any mental disorder ranging from mild to severe. Anyone self-reporting a bout of anxiety or mild depression qualifies as a data point for mental illness. For suicide ideation the SMI stat is more representative. There are 800 million weekly active users on ChatGPT. 1/800 users mentioning suicide is a surprisingly low number, if anything.

JDEW 11mo ago
> 1/800 users mentioning suicide… “conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.” Sounds like more than just mentioning suicide. Also it’s per week, which is a pretty short time interval.
- robocat 11mo ago
  But they may well be overreporting suicidal ideation... I was asking a silly question about the toxicity of eating a pellet of Uranium, and ChatGPT responded with "... you don't have to go through this alone. You can find supportive resources here[link]" My question had nothing to do with suicide, but ChatGPT assumed it did!
  - maplethorpe 11mo ago
    I got a suicide warning message on Pinterest by searching for a particular art style.
- btilly 11mo ago
  We don't know how that search was done. For example, "I don't feel my life is worth living." Is that potential suicidal intent? Also these numbers are small enough that they can easily be driven by small groups interacting with ChatGPT in unexpected ways. For example if the song "Everything I Wanted" by Billie Eilish (2019) went viral in some group, the lyrics could easily show up in a search for suicidal ideation. That said, I don't find the figure at all surprising. As has been pointed out, an estimated 5.3% of Americans report having struggled with suicidal ideation in the last 12 months. People who struggle with suicidal ideation, don't just go there once - it tends to be a recurring mental loop that hits over and over again for extended periods. So I would expect the percentage who struggled in a given week to be a large multiple of the simplistic 5.3% divided by 52 weeks. In that light this statistic has to be a severe underestimate of actual prevalence. It says more about how much people open up to ChatGPT, than it does to how many are suicidal. (Disclaimer. My views are influenced by personal experience. In the last week, my daughter has struggled with suicidal ideation. And has scars on her arm to show how she went to self-harm to try to hold the thoughts at bay. I try to remain neutral and grounded, but this is a topic that I have strong feelings about.)

hyfgfh 11mo ago

> OpenAI is trying to do something about it. Ha good one

echelon 11mo ago
If it follows the Facebook/Meta playbook, it now has a new feature label for selling ads.
diamond559 11mo ago
They're doing something about it alright, they're monetizing their pain for shareholder gainz!
- weatherlite 11mo ago
  Sure but your therapist is also monetizing your pain for his own gain. Either A.I therapy works (e.g can provide good mental relief) or it doesn't. I tend to think it's gonna be amazing at those things talking from experience (very rough week with my mom's health deterioriating fast, did a couple of sessions with Gemini that felt like I'm talking to a therapist). Perhaps it won't work well for hard issues like real mental disorders but guess what human therapists are very often also not great at treating people with serious issue.
  - mns 11mo ago
    But one is a company ran by sociopaths that have no empathy and couldn't care less about anything but money, while the other is a human that at least studied the field all their life.
    - weatherlite 11mo ago
      > But one is a company ran by sociopaths that have no empathy and couldn't care less about anything but money, while the other is a human that at least studied the field all their life. Unpacking your argument you make two points: 1) The human has studied all his life; yes, some humans study and work hard. I have also studied programming half my life and it doesn't mean A.I can't make serious contributions in programming and that A.I won't keep improving. 2) These companies, or OpenAI in particular, are untrustworthy many grabbing assholes. To this I say if they truly care about money they will try to do a good job, e.g provide an A.I that is reliable, empathetic and that actually help you get on with life. If they won't - a competitor will. That's basically the idea of capitalism and it usually works.

Barrin92 11mo ago

>Most people don't understand just how mentally unwell the US population is The US is no exception here though. One in five people having some form of mental illness (defined in the broadest possible sense in that paper) is no more shocking than observing that one in five people have a physical illness. With more data becoming available through interfaces like this it's just going to become more obvious and the taboos are going to go away. The mind's no more magical or less prone to disease than the body.

NewJazz 11mo ago

We need to monitor americans' ai usage and involuntarily commit them if they show anomalies. Allowing open source ai models without these safety measures in place is irresponsible and models like qwen or deepseek should be banned. (/s)

Auracle 11mo ago

~11% of the US population is on antidepressants. I'm not, but I personally know the biggest detriment to my mental health is just how infrequently I'm in social situations. I see my friends perhaps once every few months. We almost all have kids. I'm perfectly willing and able to set aside more time than that to hang out, but my kids are both very young still and we're aren't drowning in sports/activities yet (hopefully never...). For the rest it's like pulling teeth to get them to do anything, especially anything sent via group message. It's incredibly rare we even play a game online. Anyways, I doubt I'm alone. I certainly know my wife laments the fact she rarely gets to hang out with her friends too, but she at least has one that she walks with once a week.

anonzzzies 11mo ago
> We almost all have kids. Maybe that? I see most my close friends daily and we all do not have kids.
- Auracle 11mo ago
  I mean, sure, that definitely makes it easier. But it didn't used to be this way when people had kids, either. People used to get together a lot more frequently.
kakacik 11mo ago
Small kids do this to everybody. The only solution - if you have good family nearby, use them as parenting services from time to time, to get me-time, couple-time and social time with friends. Buy them gift or vacation as return. Its incredibly damaging to marriage which literally transforms overnight from this rosy great easy-to-manage relationship into almost daily hardship, stress and nerves. Alternative is a (good) nanny. People have issues admitting it even when its visible for everybody around, like some sort of admission you are failing as a parent, partner, human being and whatnot. Nope, we are just humans with limited energy and even good kids can siphon it well beyond 100% continuously, that's all. Now I am not saying be a bad parent, in contrary, to reach you maximum even as a parent and partner, you need to be in good shape mentally, not running on fumes continuously. Life without kids is really akin to playing game of life on easiest settings. Much less rewarding at the end, but man that freedom and simplicity... you appreciate it way more once you lose it. The way kids can easily make any parent very angry is simply not experienced elsewhere in adult life... I saw this many times on otherwise very chill people and also myself & my wife. You just can't ever get close to such fury and frustration dealing with other adults.

jrflowers 11mo ago

> At least OpenAI is trying to do something about it. They can certainly say that their chat bot has a documented history of attempting to reduce the number of suicidal people.

hirvi74 11mo ago

I am honestly surprised it’s only roughly 1 million per week. I would have believed a number at least an order magnitude higher.

stackedinserter 11mo ago

Suicide is not a mental illness. Unless you're in that soviet man-hating mindset that put every failed suicide in mental institution.