And does ChatGPT make the situation better or worse?
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2025
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The anti-AI hivemind here will hate me for saying it but I'm willing to bet $100 that this saves a significant number of lives. It's also indicative of how insufficient traditional mental health institutions are.
I'm going to say that while that's probably true there's something it leaves out.
For every life it saves it may just be postponing or causing the loss of other lives. This is because it's not a healthcare professional and it will absolutely help to mask a lot of poor mental health symptoms which just kicks the can down the road.
It does not really help to save someone from getting hit by a bus today if they try to get hit by the bus again tomorrow and the day after and so on.
Do I think it may have a net positive effect in the short term? Yes. Do I believe that that positive effect stays a complete net positive in the long term? No.
hivemind
On the decentralised platform, with everyone from Russian tankies, to Portuguese anarchists, to American MAGAts and everything in between on it? If you say so...
You must be new to lemmy if you don't know that AI definitely qualifies as a hivemind topic here.
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This is the thing. I'll bet most of those million don't have another support system. For certain it's inferior in every way to professional mental health providers, but does it save lives? I think it'll be a while before we have solid answers for that, but I would imagine lives saved by having ChatGPT > lives saved by having nothing.
The other question is how many people could access professional services but won't because they use ChatGPT instead. I would expect them to have worse outcomes. Someone needs to put all the numbers together with a methodology for deriving those answers. Because the answer to this simple question is unknown.
Sounds like we should shut them down then to prevent a health crisis then.
Okay, hear me out: How much of that is a function of ChatGPT and how much of that is a function of... gestures at everything else
MOSTLY joking. But had a good talk with my primary care doctor at the bar the other week (only kinda awkward) about how she and her team have had to restructure the questions they use to check for depression and the like because... fucking EVERYONE is depressed and stressed out but for reasons that we "understand".
I mean… it’s been a rough few years
So they want to play the strategy that they are relevant
In other news, a million people use openai???
Over 400 million people use ChatGPT. Likely more use openai
Apparently, "suicide" is also a disproportionally common search term on Bing as opposed to other search engines. What does that say about Microsoft?
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Not very informative. I want to know what percentage is the us and if it increased in the last year.
as long as prompts are cheaper than therapy …