Mental Health Crisis Incoming - Daily Laterals #7

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Welcome to Day 7 of Daily Laterals - a race against myself to see who crumbles first: my will to write daily shorts like these or time itself.

Daily Laterals (weekends not included) covers a short concept/idea I’m currently thinking about or thoughts on a piece of information I’ve recently read.

It’s meant to sprinkle a bit of food for thought next to all the brainrot.

Every week, 1.2 million people are telling AI they’re planning to hurt themselves.

To be fair, AI is getting better at managing those very delicate conversations.

OpenAI published some data around this topic.

The bigger problem is that more and more people are relying on AI to make decisions about their life.

In 2021, 22% of UK adults said they used a mental health chatbot and 44% said they used the service exclusively without seeing a therapist.

Chat is eating intimacy. AI companions and NSFW role-play bots are becoming the norm. They’re in a16z’s own Top 100 consumer AI list right next to general assistants, with entries like JanitorAI, Joi, CrushOn, Juicychat, and Spicychat sitting alongside ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. That’s not a moral judgment. It’s a market signal.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Loneliness itself is driving AI use. In a Stanford-led survey of 1,006 student Replika users, 90% reported feeling some degree of loneliness (with 43% classified as severely lonely). Many say AI helped them, which is encouraging. Or just survivor bias.

The main problem is how much AI is driving confirmation bias in people.

Based on this and the general vibes I’m feeling, I’m certain we’re in the books for a pretty nasty mental health pandemic.

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