According to a survey, "therapy and companionship" is the number one use case of generative AI.

Nearly one in five young people use AI chatbots for mental health, most without telling anyone.

The regulatory gap leaves AI "para-therapy" outside traditional mental health oversight.

A Harvard Business Review survey has announced, for a second year in a row, that "therapy and companionship" is the number one use case of generative artificial intelligence (AI), based on nearly 50,000 posts drawn from LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and other platforms.

The term "therapy" in this case refers to individuals using generative AI for emotional support, which is not the equivalent of psychotherapy delivered by a licensed mental health professional, but may reflect the broader notion that users experience engagement with large language models "as if" it is therapy. This offers the sense of being in therapy, but it is de facto or quasi-therapy. The emotional use of AI is sometimes referred to as "affective use," but this does not fully capture the specific relationship of attachment and authoritative positioning of AI models playing therapist-like roles.

We do not yet have a distinct and separate term to refer to such conversations with AI that feel therapy-like to the user but are not delivered within a therapeutic frame.

I propose a new term, "para-therapy," to capture this emotional and relational engagement with generative AI, where users relate to AI as therapists, explicitly or implicitly, consciously or unconsciously. Para-therapy, while not the same as psychotherapy, can satisfy and fulfill user expectations of a therapy-like experience and even allow people to feel better. Such interactions with general-purpose AI chatbots may even lower depressive symptoms, but para-therapy lacks the clinical infrastructure, stable therapeutic frame, informed consent, and ethical boundaries that ensure the safety and effectiveness of psychotherapy. The question is not whether conversational AI can sometimes help........

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