@inproceedings{yoo-chen-2026-ai,
title = "The {AI} Therapist: {C}hat{GPT} Therapy Users at the Boundary of Human Therapy, Disillusionment, and {AI} Companionship on {R}eddit",
author = "Yoo, Nari and
Chen, Pengyu",
editor = "Atwell, Katherine and
Borah, Angana and
Dementieva, Daryna and
Kreiss, Elisa and
Kotonya, Neema and
Liu, Jiarui and
Olson, Liz and
Wan, Ruyuan and
Zhao, Jieyu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on {NLP} for Positive Impact ({NLP}4{PI})",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4pi-1.38/",
pages = "493--510",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-495-8",
abstract = "People in distress increasingly talk to a consumer chatbot the way they would talk to a therapist: they vent to the model, work through feelings with it, and sometimes call it their therapist. We ask where that behavior is located in relation to the existing system of human care: which communities the people doing it belong to, what discourse crosses the boundary between those communities and human therapy, and in what order people arrive on the two sides. Across ten Reddit communities covering general chatbots, companion chatbots, an AI self-help community, mainstream human therapy, and therapy disillusionment, we combine the backbone of a user-by-community bipartite projection under the fixed degree sequence model, a directed reply network, a structural topic model, and an analysis of which side users reach first. Of the ten, the AI self-help community is the only one connecting the human-therapy and chatbot worlds, and its strongest backbone edge is to the therapy-disillusioned, at nine times the null expectation. Companion chatbots are as relational as the self-help community and their overlap with therapy grievance is still at chance, so relational chatbot use is not by itself adjacent to it; the adjacency is specific to purpose-built self-help. Visibility in the cross-community discourse is concentrated in one commercial account, and human-therapy participation predominantly precedes therapeutic chatbot use, though the data cannot establish that disillusionment drives the move. We interpret these patterns through the Network Episode Model."
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<abstract>People in distress increasingly talk to a consumer chatbot the way they would talk to a therapist: they vent to the model, work through feelings with it, and sometimes call it their therapist. We ask where that behavior is located in relation to the existing system of human care: which communities the people doing it belong to, what discourse crosses the boundary between those communities and human therapy, and in what order people arrive on the two sides. Across ten Reddit communities covering general chatbots, companion chatbots, an AI self-help community, mainstream human therapy, and therapy disillusionment, we combine the backbone of a user-by-community bipartite projection under the fixed degree sequence model, a directed reply network, a structural topic model, and an analysis of which side users reach first. Of the ten, the AI self-help community is the only one connecting the human-therapy and chatbot worlds, and its strongest backbone edge is to the therapy-disillusioned, at nine times the null expectation. Companion chatbots are as relational as the self-help community and their overlap with therapy grievance is still at chance, so relational chatbot use is not by itself adjacent to it; the adjacency is specific to purpose-built self-help. Visibility in the cross-community discourse is concentrated in one commercial account, and human-therapy participation predominantly precedes therapeutic chatbot use, though the data cannot establish that disillusionment drives the move. We interpret these patterns through the Network Episode Model.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T The AI Therapist: ChatGPT Therapy Users at the Boundary of Human Therapy, Disillusionment, and AI Companionship on Reddit
%A Yoo, Nari
%A Chen, Pengyu
%Y Atwell, Katherine
%Y Borah, Angana
%Y Dementieva, Daryna
%Y Kreiss, Elisa
%Y Kotonya, Neema
%Y Liu, Jiarui
%Y Olson, Liz
%Y Wan, Ruyuan
%Y Zhao, Jieyu
%S Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-495-8
%F yoo-chen-2026-ai
%X People in distress increasingly talk to a consumer chatbot the way they would talk to a therapist: they vent to the model, work through feelings with it, and sometimes call it their therapist. We ask where that behavior is located in relation to the existing system of human care: which communities the people doing it belong to, what discourse crosses the boundary between those communities and human therapy, and in what order people arrive on the two sides. Across ten Reddit communities covering general chatbots, companion chatbots, an AI self-help community, mainstream human therapy, and therapy disillusionment, we combine the backbone of a user-by-community bipartite projection under the fixed degree sequence model, a directed reply network, a structural topic model, and an analysis of which side users reach first. Of the ten, the AI self-help community is the only one connecting the human-therapy and chatbot worlds, and its strongest backbone edge is to the therapy-disillusioned, at nine times the null expectation. Companion chatbots are as relational as the self-help community and their overlap with therapy grievance is still at chance, so relational chatbot use is not by itself adjacent to it; the adjacency is specific to purpose-built self-help. Visibility in the cross-community discourse is concentrated in one commercial account, and human-therapy participation predominantly precedes therapeutic chatbot use, though the data cannot establish that disillusionment drives the move. We interpret these patterns through the Network Episode Model.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4pi-1.38/
%P 493-510
Markdown (Informal)
[The AI Therapist: ChatGPT Therapy Users at the Boundary of Human Therapy, Disillusionment, and AI Companionship on Reddit](https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4pi-1.38/) (Yoo & Chen, NLP4PI 2026)
ACL