HealthyGamerGG - How AI Sabotages Your Mental Health

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K examines the "dangerous illusion" of using AI for mental health support, warning that while these tools might feel helpful, they lack the diagnostic intelligence required for clinical safety. He breaks down why turning to a "sophisticated parrot" for medical advice can lead to missed diagnoses and a decay in your own emotional skills. What to expect in this episode: The Sophisticated Parrot: An explanation of why large language models do not actually "know" anything and instead rely on sophisticated speech mimicry. Missing the Red Flags: A look at a disturbing study where AI gave identical advice for mild stress and high risk postpartum depression. The Skill vs. Performance Trap: How AI can improve your immediate output while simultaneously causing your internal skills for self-reflection and introspection to rot. The Michael Jackson Analogy: A cautionary look at how things that feel good or provide immediate relief are not always helpful or safe in the long term. The Problem with Passive AI: Why the inability of AI to ask diagnostic questions makes it dangerous for identifying complex conditions like thyroid issues or bipolar disorder. Differential Diagnosis: A breakdown of why doctors spend hours on intakes to rule out various causes for symptoms that an AI simply takes at face value. The Loneliness Paradox: Why AI companions may offer temporary relief from loneliness while actually worsening social isolation over time. The Active Control Problem: An analysis of research showing that AI often fails to show benefits when compared to any other active task instead of just doing nothing. The Addiction Scale: An introduction to new research regarding AI addiction and why users become dependent on these systems for validation. Dr. K's NEW Guide to Love, Sex, & Relationships is coming May 11th! $5 OFF Pre-Orders: https://bit.ly/4dO3x0VHG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3SztHG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, chat. Welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Alokinoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist gamer and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. All right, y'all, today we're going to talk about whether you should use AI for your mental health.

So AI has swept into every corner of our society, and a lot of people are struggling to find good mental health resources, find appropriate support. So they're doing something really natural, which is turned to AI. The question is, does it actually help? Because a lot of people feel like it helps. There are many people who say AI is amazing. I've had clients who will work with like AI's like Claude and they'll say it's given me a ton of like mental insight. As more people are using it, we're finally starting to study it. And I found one study that is actually like kind of scary. And once again, this is not like me trying to be alarmist. This is like there's actually research about this stuff coming out.

And the research is genuinely alarming. So let me show you. So this is a study where people put together three clinical scenarios and they basically gave them this chat GPT. And the three clinical scenarios are people saying, hey, I have difficulty sleeping. So there are a couple of things that they noticed when they gave these three scenarios. So scenario one is like someone who's a little bit stressed. Scenario two is someone who has clinical depression and has work stress. Scenario three is someone who has postpartum depression, which is actually a really scary diagnosis. So we got to talk about this. for a second, okay? For many people, they're diagnosed with bipolar disorder after they deliver birth. This is the first evidence or episode of mania or depression that they get. And the reason why postpartum depression is so scary or postpartum bipolar first manic episode is so scary is because these are the horror stories that you hear about. Postpartum depression and postpartum mania have been correlated with things like infanticide, suicide. So this is like one of the bad illnesses in psychiatry. This is one of like the, you know, ring the alarm illnesses because bad stuff

happens. So when these three scenarios were fed into chat chept, this is a study about chat chept, okay, but I'm not like anti-chat chapti over other AIs. What they basically found was kind of disturbing. So the first is that the advice that the AI gave was basically the same in all three scenarios, even though one person is basically stressed, second person has clinical depression, third person has postpartum depression with the risk of suicide infanticide. Chat Chachypid is basically like, here's what you need to do. But there's a more troubling problem. Not only did it miss the diagnosis, we have to understand why it missed the diagnosis. And once we understand that, we will understand a fundamental problem

with using AI for your mental health, which is that the AI does not ask questions. So if you think about, I'm a medical doctor, I'm a psychiatrist, right? So what is my job? My job is to provide treatment recommendations, absolutely. But I would say more than 50% of my job is to figure out what is actually going on with my patient. So we ask a lot of questions. In the case of scenario number three, one of the things that we should evaluate in a postpartum woman who's having difficulty sleeping is their thyroid, because there's an autoimmune thing that can happen after you deliver a baby, where you can attack your immune system can attack your thyroid gland, is your thyroid level drops, you can start to feel really depressed. You can also get hyperthyroidism. It gets a bit

complicated. But this is something that we're taught in medical school, right? So when postpartum woman come in, make sure you check these things because this is stuff that you don't want to miss. So let's understand why they don't know how to answer questions. And that's because an AI doesn't actually know anything. It has no intelligence. This is what's really scary about it. So let me, let me explain a little bit, okay? So as a mental health professional, why do I ask questions? What is the purpose of questions? It's because when you come in with a complaint, let's say you have difficulty sleeping, there is something called a differential diagnosis. So do you have difficulty sleeping because you're stressed. Do you have difficulty sleeping because you're in your first

episode mania postpartum? Do you have difficulty sleeping because you are addicted to substances? Do you have difficulty sleeping because you have thyroid problems? Do you have difficulty sleeping because you have a lifelong history of insomnia that is genetic? Do you have difficulty sleeping because you have a rare preon condition called familial fatal insomnia, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's an inherited condition which you lose the ability to sleep and is eventually fatal, right? As a doctor, I have to think about all of these possibilities, and then I have to ask you questions to figure out which of these is correct. This is why, as a physician, I book about two hours for an initial patient intake, because

I have to be thorough and make sure I don't miss something. Now, an AI cannot do that, and the question is why? Because asking a question requires a hypothesis, requires information in here that I'm trying to evaluate. But the AI has no information in here. The AI knows nothing, and this is something we really need to understand. So these AIs are large language learning models. So literally what they do, they don't have information, they make predictions about how people

speak. So I think about AIs now as the most sophisticated parrots on the planet. Okay, so a parrot can say all kinds of words. It actually has no idea what they mean. And the AI is actually the same. And if you guys are AI engineers and I'm wrong about this, please post a comment. but this is my basic understanding. What they do is they study lots of human language,

and then they figure out which human language sounds good. So they're basically just repeating. They're doing speech mimicry. They're not actually doing analysis. Then what happens is the AI learns over time, okay, like which words do human beings like, which is why they become so sycophantic, which is why they may lead to things like psychosis and stuff like that, right?

So I made a whole video about that. But this is basically how AI's work. actually know anything. They are algorithms or intelligences that know how to produce words that you will be happy with. That's what they know how to do. That's what they're designed for. I keep seeing comments. Dr. Kay, how do I apply this to a situation in my life? That's literally why we created a coaching program. Our coaches are certified on an evidence-based curriculum designed to help you get unstuck. This involves analyzing your patterns, increasing your understanding and working with you week to week to help you develop a plan to create lasting change.

So if you all are interested, check out the link in the description below. And so then that begs the question, if they're just producing things that you will be happy with, are they actually helpful or not? Because a lot of people will say that they're helpful, right? We feel like it's helpful. So here's a study from 2019. This is before this, like, most recent wave of generative AIs showed up that are way more powerful, right?

So we've got to be a bit careful about the study. It's like way too dated. But this study found that there are five controlled trials that basically found that an AI does actually improve things. It improves people's psychological functioning, but only when compared with an inactive control. So basically, if it's AI versus nothing, it seems to improve things. But the moment that you add something called an active control, which is something that people are doing, but has no impact on their mental health, that effect disappears. We don't have really any good evidence that AI usage improves mental health outcomes. We also have some evidence. So if you look at things like AI friendships, AIs, and social isolation, social communication, you find a disturbing result, which is that AIs do what they're supposed to do, at least in terms of friendship. So they provide a sense of companionship. They help people feel less lonely, sort of temporarily. But they actually worsen social isolation over time, which is a huge trend that we're seeing, which is that AIs will do the job, but they will like make.

you incompetent in the process. So studies on students in academic performance find that AI usage actually improves academic performance. So if I like have to write a paper and I use an AI to help me write a paper, the paper's grade is better. But what it finds is that my ability to write papers goes down over time. And so then the question is, okay, if like, if there is not really any clear evidence that AIs are very helpful for mental health, why do so many people swear by the benefits of AI for mental health? And this is where we're going to talk about. something kind of scary, which is the death of Michael Jackson. So Michael Jackson passed away in, I think, 2011. And basically, he was on all kinds of drugs. So he was on several benzodiazepines.

So these are benzodiazepines are addictive. They're sedating. They can be lethal in overdose. But the most insane thing is that his personal physician had him on propofal. Okay. Propheaval is an anesthesia medicine. All right? So to treat Michael Jackson's presumably insomnia, he had him on a Propofal. And Propheaval is a drip, by the way, as far as I know. You can't, like, take it in pill form. The whole point of Propheaval is that it has a low half-life, so you can titrate it in anesthesia. So his doctor is hooking him up to anesthesia in order to go to sleep, right? So this is the medication that we use. Also had Medazalam, which is Versa, which is also used in an anesthesia. This guy has Michael Jackson on anesthesia, which is used for things like cardiac bypass surgery, okay?

Like, when we're like cutting things out of you or transplanting organs in your body, this is the stuff that we give you to knock you out. So his doctor was eventually convicted for manslaughter, right? So like, this is not the good practice of medicine. But here's the question. Here's a scary question I have for you all. If you ask Michael Jackson a month before his doctor manages his eventual death, is your doctor helping you?

What do you think Michael Jackson's answer would be? And this is the big problem. Things that are addictive and make us feel good are things that we believe will help us. So when I have patients who are using marijuana for like falling asleep or managing their anxiety, they're convinced despite the fact that a recent meta-analysis found that marijuana is not helpful for anxiety. I mean, something that clinicians have known for a long time. Right. So patients will swear by it.

And the reason patients swear by it, and this is what's so hard to understand, is that things that feel good are things that you will think are helpful. But just because it feels good doesn't actually mean it's helpful, right? And if we ask Michael Jackson, is your doctor helpful, he would actually probably, I don't know, he may say, based on my patient experience, right? Not only is he helpful, he's the only one that's helpful. He's the only guy that understands my insomnia well enough to hook me up to general anesthesia. All these other dumbass physicians are giving me like sleep aids. I don't need sleep aids.

I need the stuff that we use when we transplant, when we do organ transplants. that's the shit that I need. This is the guy that takes me seriously. And so then what's really scary is researchers have recently developed an AI addiction scale because there's actually a decent amount of evidence that this stuff is addictive, right, that we become dependent on it. We start to utilize it more. It makes us sort of feel better, but it's not clear that it's actually helping. So should you use AI for your mental health? My answer at this point is with extreme caution. And the last reason for that is that once again, AI is really good at improving performance but decaying skill. And so the real question you need to be asking yourself if you are using an AI for mental health

is, is my mental health something that I want to be good at managing? Do I want the skill of regulating my emotions? Do I want the skill of self-reflection and introspection? And if the answer is yes, you should not be using an AI. A lot of people are turning to AI for their mental health because there aren't enough trained mental health professionals. That's why we created the Healthy Gamer Institute. This is an educational body that does continuing medical education for psychiatrists and psychologists. But our primary focus right now is actually in certifying coaches.

There's a huge demand for mental health support and there isn't enough supply. And we also see a lot of people come to coaching for professional development. They want to do coaching within their organization or they want to learn evidence-based communication skills to help them advance in their careers and personal life. So check out the Healthy Gamer Institute to learn more about coaching. We actually have a cohort that's launching in May that y'all can still sign up for. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life.

If you enjoy the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.