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Mental health: Young people get better answers from ChatGPT than from experts
Healthcare professionals are also satisfied with the answers from AI.
When young people ask about mental health, the answers from ChatGPT are both more useful and more relevant than the answers from healthcare professionals.
This is according to the young people themselves.
The advice is easy to understand
“Professionals and young people both found that ChatGPT was able to provide advice that they perceived as relevant, empathetic, and easy to understand,” says researcher Marita Skjuve.
Skjuve and her colleagues at SINTEF and the University of Oslo selected real questions that young people posed to a Norwegian charity about their own mental health.
Both AI and professionals responded. More specifically, ChatGPT and professionals working for the youth information service ung.no.
123 youth and 31 healthcare professionals reviewed the answers. They did not know who answered what.
They were also not told what the researchers were planning to investigate.
ChatGPT scored higher
In the blind test, participants were asked to assess how useful, relevant, understandable, and empathetic the answers were.
They were also asked to choose the answer they liked best and explain why. The young people gave ChatGPT the highest ratings across the board.
The professionals who responded also gave ChatGPT better ratings, but here the differences are not as pronounced.
“We observed that young people like answers from ChatGPT a little better because they are easy to understand and are perceived as being immediately useful. The answers describe what the youth can do to solve a possible problem related to their mental health,” says Skjuve.
“And we should also remember that ChatGPT is pretty good at giving neat and clear answers with bullet points,” she says.
The professionals do not always see it the same way. They tend to be a little more critical of ChatGPT’s diagnostic language.
ChatGPT is also not always perceived as being as validating or empathetic as a response from a professional.
“But on the whole, we see that both groups think that ChatGPT provides good answers that can help,” says the researcher.
ChatGPT tries to make a diagnosis
The study did not assess whether there were any errors in the answers, and the professionals did not point out any such errors.
They were not asked to do so, but nobody independently stated that anything was directly wrong.
“AI doesn’t always understand the context and can make up answers. Therefore, quality assurance from health personnel is important in this area,” says Skjuve.
A few people still pointed out that ChatGPT could have a tendency to try to make a diagnosis.
Health professionals who work for aid organisations have to abide by strict guidelines. They are supposed to give advice – but not provide direct healthcare or make diagnoses. ChatGPT has no such guidelines.
Skjuve wonders whether this could be a reason why ChatGPT is perceived as more practical and useful.
Professionals can learn from AI
The question then becomes whether artificial intelligence like ChatGPT should be used to help with mental health.
“What we’ve learned is that ChatGPT is capable of creating answers that young people understand and find easy to read. We humans can learn from that,” says Skjuve.
She suggests that perhaps AI can support the work of a professional and help clarify the information for a young person.
Skjuve can imagine AI as a support tool. It could help professionals respond to young people better and faster. This way, mental health help can be scaled up.
Responses from AI must be quality assured
Professionals could reach more young people who need help. At the same time, they retain professional control and can assure the quality of the AI answers.
“The last point is very important. AI can often give the wrong answer, and this can be critical in matters of mental health,” says Skjuve.
She believes the future may be hybrid services where AI and health personnel work more closely together to formulate good answers.
She thinks the danger lies in young people going to AI to get an answer right away instead of waiting two to three days for a quality-assured response from a health service.
Researcher was not surprised
The researcher was not really surprised by the findings.
“In other studies we have seen that AI can often be perceived as responding better than health personnel do. AI is often good at responding in a welcoming and empathetic way,” says Skjuve.
The researchers have now conducted a follow-up study without a blind test. In this case, the group involved knew who had actually answered the question.
It appears that they prefer the answers provided by the healthcare professionals and are more sceptical of AI. The results are not clear and have not yet been published.
Reference:
Skjuve et al. ChatGPT as a mental health advisory service: Comparing evaluations from youth and health professionals, Digital Health, 2026. DOI: 10.1177/20552076261427447
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Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no
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