AI & Mental Health: A Critical Inquiry
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being positioned as a tool for mental health support, emotional companionship, and even therapy. For some people, AI offers an accessible place to put difficult feelings into words. For others, it raises urgent questions about care, connection, accountability, and what it means to be understood.
But what happens when a technology can simulate the language of care without participating in the relationships that make care meaningful?
This essay series explores the growing intersection of artificial intelligence and mental health through a critical, relational, and socially informed lens. Rather than treating AI as either an inevitable solution or an uncomplicated threat, these essays ask us to look more closely at what simulated care offers, what it leaves out, and what we risk losing when human relationships are reduced to something that can be replicated by a machine.
The questions at the heart of this series extend beyond technology itself. They concern our expectations of care, the conditions that make people vulnerable to its simulation, and the social systems shaping how we seek support.
Read the series
The essays are designed to be read in order, moving from an initial inquiry into AI and mental health toward a deeper examination of simulated care and the relational foundations of therapy.
Part 1: Beginning a Critical Inquiry
Where should we begin when examining AI's growing role in mental health?
The opening essay establishes the questions and critical framework that guide this series, inviting readers to look beyond the promises of emerging technology and examine the assumptions shaping its use in mental health contexts.
Read Part 1: Beginning a Critical Inquiry →
Part 2: Why Simulated Care Feels Like Care, but Isn't
Why can an interaction with AI feel emotionally meaningful, even when the relationship is fundamentally different from human care?
This essay explores the experience of simulated care and the distinction between an interaction that feels supportive and a relationship capable of offering genuine human reciprocity, presence, and accountability.
Read Part 2: Why Simulated Care Feels Like Care, but Isn't →
Part 3: What Therapy Requires That Simulation Cannot Provide
What makes therapy more than a conversation that sounds therapeutic?
The third essay turns toward the relational dimensions of therapy, examining what meaningful therapeutic work requires beyond the ability to generate empathic language or simulate understanding.
Read Part 3: What Therapy Requires That Simulation Cannot Provide →
Beyond the simulation
The growing use of AI in mental health invites us to ask more than whether a technology is useful, convenient, or convincing. We also need to ask what kind of care we are building, whose needs it serves, and what happens when the appearance of connection is treated as equivalent to connection itself.
Accessibility matters. So do the social conditions that make support difficult to obtain, the limitations of existing mental health systems, and the real needs of people seeking understanding and relief.
A critical inquiry into AI and mental health must hold these tensions together. It must make room for the reasons people turn to these tools while remaining attentive to the differences between generating the language of care and participating in the responsibilities of a caring relationship.
These questions are part of a larger conversation about technology, power, and the stories we tell about what humans need from one another.
Between Stories is interested in those questions precisely because the answers are not merely technical. They are relational, cultural, and deeply human.