One in Eight Adolescents and Young Adults Use AI Chatbots for Mental Health Advice
For Release
Friday
November 7, 2025
About 1 in 8 U.S. adolescents and young adults use AI chatbots for mental health advice, with the behavior most common among those aged 18 to 21, according to a new study.
Among those who used chatbots for mental health advice, 66 percent engage at least monthly, and over 93 percent reported that they found the advice helpful.
The study draws on the first nationally representative survey of U.S. adolescents and young adults aged 12 to 21, examining the prevalence, frequency, and perceived helpfulness of advice from generative AI tools when feeling sad, angry, or nervous.
The study is published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
Researchers say that the high use rates likely reflect the low cost, immediacy, and perceived privacy of AI-based advice, particularly among youth who are unlikely to receive traditional counseling. However, they say engagement with generative AI raises concerns, especially for users with intensive mental health needs.
“There are few standardized benchmarks for evaluating mental health advice offered by AI chatbots, and there is limited transparency about the datasets that are used to train these large language models,” said Jonathan Cantor, the study's corresponding author and a senior policy researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.
Since the launch of large language model (LLM) chatbots such as ChatGPT, the use of this form of generative AI has grown rapidly—especially among adolescents and young adults. Concurrently, the United States is experiencing a youth mental health crisis, with 18 percent of adolescents aged 12 to 17 having had a major depressive episode over the past year and 40 percent of these youth receiving no mental health care.
Between February and March 2025, RAND researchers surveyed 1,058 youth aged 12 to 21 from the RAND American Life Panel and Ipsos's KnowledgePanel. Both survey panels use random sampling from population frames of U.S. households.
Participants were asked about their use of generative AI and whether they had used such tools for mental health advice.
Researchers say that the high utilization rates likely reflect the low cost, immediacy, and perceived privacy of AI-based advice, particularly for youth who might not receive traditional counseling.
The study found that Black respondents reported lower perceived helpfulness of AI chatbots, signaling potential cultural competency gaps.
The survey did not include measures of diagnosed mental illness. Researchers say that future research should examine the utilization rates among children with mental health conditions and the impact on mental health–related outcomes.
Support for the study was provided by the National Institute of Mental Health.
Other authors of the study include Ryan K. McBain, Robert Bozick, Melissa Diliberti, Li Ang Zhang, Aaron Kofner, Joshua Breslau, Bradley D. Stein, and Lori Uscher Pines from RAND; Fang Zhang, Alyssa Burnett, Benjamin Rader, and Hao Yu, from the Harvard Medical School; and Ateev Mehrotra from the Brown University School of Public Health.
RAND Health promotes healthier societies by improving health care systems in the United States and other countries.
