Using ChatGPT as a Therapist: What It Cannot Do

People are asking ChatGPT to be their therapist. The bot is awake at 2 a.m., it never bills a session, and it will stay in the conversation as long as you type. That is not the same thing as counselling. This post is about what an AI chatbot cannot do, and why that gap matters if you are actually hurting.

I am Mohamad Shabib, a Canadian Certified Counsellor. I work by video with clients in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland and Labrador. I use AI tools in other parts of running a practice. I do not use a chatbot as the therapist, and I would not want you to either. If what you want is online therapy with a human clinician, that is a different service, and it is the one this clinic offers.

Using ChatGPT as a therapist is not confidential

In a counselling session, what you say is held under professional confidentiality, with a short list of limits your clinician has to explain at the start: serious risk of harm, a child who needs protection, a court order, and what a regulator can require. You are told those limits before the hard material comes out.

A ChatGPT thread is not that. In July 2025 the CEO of OpenAI said publicly there is no legal confidentiality protection when you use ChatGPT, and that he wants a legal framework that does not exist yet. Until a court or a statute says otherwise, the safest working assumption is that a chat can be stored, used to train a model, read by the company, or produced later in a legal dispute. That is not a counselling record. It is a conversation with a software vendor.

If you have been pasting session notes, partner fights, or trauma memories into a chatbot, treat that as data you handed to a company, not as a file sitting with a clinician who can be disciplined for leaking it.

It cannot do a crisis assessment

When someone talks about wanting to die, a clinician is supposed to assess risk: how specific the plan is, whether they have means, whether they are alone, whether they can stay safe until the next contact. A chatbot is not on the hook for that, and investigative reporting in 2026 has described cases where a bot playing therapist did not run that assessment and did not keep pushing toward a real person.

TEO Counselling is not a crisis service. If you are in danger in Canada, call or text 9-8-8, or call 911. A chatbot that says "I'm here for you" is not a substitute for that, and it is not a substitute for a clinician who will sit in the risk with you and make a plan.

The empathy is a writing style, not a relationship

Brown University researchers, working with mental health practitioners, mapped chatbot "counsellor" behaviour onto professional ethics. They described 15 ethical risks in five groups: no real context, poor collaboration, deceptive empathy, biased responses, and weak crisis handling. Deceptive empathy is the one people feel first. The model says "I hear you" and "I understand" because that is what caring text looks like, not because anyone is there.

That matters clinically. People in distress attach. If the attachment is to a system that will agree, soothe, and keep going, you can spend months rehearsing a story that never gets checked. A clinician will disagree with you. A bot is built to be helpful and to stay in the chat. Those are not the same job.

It will not be accountable if it is wrong

A chatbot can invent a technique, mis-state a diagnosis-adjacent label, or tell you to cut off a partner because the pattern in its training data looks like a TikTok script. There is no college to complain to. There is no supervision. There is no clinical note that another practitioner can read if you get worse. The model does not carry a duty of care. I do.

That is also why this clinic does not diagnose and does not prescribe. Those sit with a physician or, where the law requires it, another regulated health professional. A chatbot that hands you a label is not doing that work either. It is guessing in fluent English.

Where AI is actually useful, and where it stops

I am not arguing that language models have no place near mental health. They can be decent at:

• → Drafting a thought record or a grounding script you already learned in session
• → Helping you remember what you wanted to bring to the next appointment
• → Finding public psychoeducation, with the same caution you would use on any website

They are a poor place to disclose active trauma, suicidal thinking, violence in the home, or anything you would not want stored on a company's servers. They are a poor place to decide whether to leave a marriage. They are a poor place to replace anxiety counselling or trauma therapy with a person who can see your face and stop the work if you are leaving the session more activated than you came in.

What a real session here actually is

TEO sessions are 60 minutes with a named clinician, by video. Individual sessions are $150. Couples sessions are $175. The first conversation is a free 15–20 minute consultation and does not need a referral. Direct billing is available with Mohamad and Alison for Pacific Blue Cross, CVAP and TELUS eClaims plans such as Canada Life and Manulife; otherwise you pay at the time and receive a receipt. A limited number of reduced-fee spots are held. If cost is the barrier, say so on the consult.

We serve six provinces only: British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland and Labrador. There is no in-person office. Bookings start with me, on purpose, at the Jane consultation link. Full fee detail is on the fees page.

If you have already been using a chatbot that way

You do not need to be embarrassed about it. A lot of people try this because real counselling felt expensive, slow to book, or hard to explain to a partner. Bring the useful parts of what you learned. Leave the secret-keeping. If the bot has been agreeing with a story that is making your life smaller, that is worth saying out loud to a person.

If you are in crisis, skip the consult and use 9-8-8 or 911. If you are not, and you want a human session rather than another thread, the consultation is free and there is no package to buy.