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OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

techcrunch.com

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Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

#71

Post by chris_wot »

coliveira wrote: post #37
yieldcrv wrote: post #28

I talk to ChatGPT about topics I feel society isnt enlightened enough to talk about I feel suicide is heavily misunderstood as well People just copypasta prevention hotlines and turn their minds off from the topic Although people have identified a subset of the population that is just impulsively considering suicide and can be deterred, it doesnt serve the other unidentified subsets who are underserved by merely dist…

> then where would I talk about that? Alert: with ChatGPT you're not talking to anyone. It's not a human being.

Which is perfect. In Australia, I tried to talk to Lifeline about wanting to commit suicide. They called the police on me (no, they are not a confidential service). I then found myself in a very bad situation. ChatGPT can't be much worse.

Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

#73

Post by bdangubic »

chris_wot wrote: post #71
coliveira wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then where would I talk about that? Alert: with ChatGPT you're not talking to anyone. It's not a human being.

Which is perfect. In Australia, I tried to talk to Lifeline about wanting to commit suicide. They called the police on me (no, they are not a confidential service). I then found myself in a very bad situation. ChatGPT can't be much worse.

except in US where this info will be sold and you won’t be able to get life insurance, job etc

Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

#74

Post by golergka »

mgh2 wrote: post #8
NathanKP wrote: post #3

> It is estimated that more than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (59.3 million in 2022; 23.1% of the U.S. adult population). https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness Most people don't understand just how mentally unwell the US population is. Of course there are one million talking to ChatGPT about suicide weekly. This is not a surprising stat at all. It's just a question of what to…

Are you sure ChatGPT is the solution? It just sounds like another "savior complex" sell spin from tech. 1. Social media -> connection 2. AGI -> erotica 3. Suicide -> prevention All these for engagement (i.e. addiction). It seems like the tech industry is the root cause itself trying to masquerade the problem by brainwashing the population. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026886

ChatGPT/Claude can be absolutely brilliant in supportive, every day therapy, in my experience. BUT there are few caveats: I'm in therapy for a long time already (500+ hours), I don't trust it with important judgements or advice that goes counter to what I or my therapists think, and I also give Claude access to my diary with MCP, which makes it much better at figuring the context of what I'm talking about.

Also, please keep in mind "supportive, every day". It's talking through stuff that I already know about, not seeking some new insights and revelations. Just shooting the shit with an entity which is booted with well defined ideas from you, your real human therapist and can give you very predictable, just common sense reactions that can still help when it's 2am and you have nobody to talk to, and all of your friends have already heard this exact talk about these exact problems 10 times already.

Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

#76

Post by drdaeman »

echelon wrote: post #43
mrastro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised it's that low to be honest. By their definition of any mental illness, it can be anything from severe schizophrenia to mild autism. The subset that would consider suicide is a small slice of that. Would be more meaningful to look at the % of people with suicidal ideation.

> By their definition of any mental illness, it can be anything from severe schizophrenia to mild autism. Depression, schizophrenia, and mild autism (which by their accounting probably also includes ADHD) should NOT be thrown together into the same bucket. These are wholly different things, with entirely different experiences, treatments, and management techniques.

Mild/high-functional autism, as far as I understand it, is not even an illness but a variant of normalcy. Just different.

Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

#77

Post by chris_wot »

bdangubic wrote: post #73
chris_wot wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is perfect. In Australia, I tried to talk to Lifeline about wanting to commit suicide. They called the police on me (no, they are not a confidential service). I then found myself in a very bad situation. ChatGPT can't be much worse.

except in US where this info will be sold and you won’t be able to get life insurance, job etc

Lucky I'm not in the U.S. then.

Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

#78

Post by NewJazz »

NathanKP wrote: post #3

> It is estimated that more than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (59.3 million in 2022; 23.1% of the U.S. adult population). https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness Most people don't understand just how mentally unwell the US population is. Of course there are one million talking to ChatGPT about suicide weekly. This is not a surprising stat at all. It's just a question of what to…

We need to monitor americans' ai usage and involuntarily commit them if they show anomalies.

Allowing open source ai models without these safety measures in place is irresponsible and models like qwen or deepseek should be banned. (/s)

Re: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

#79

Post by brainless »

This is not suprising at all. Having gone through therapy a few years back, I would have had a chat with LLMs if I was in a poor mental health situation. There is no other system that is available at scale, 24x7 on my phone.

A chat like this is not a solution though, it is an indicator that our societies have issues is large parts of our population that we are unable to deal with. We are not helping enough people. Topics like mental health are still difficult to discuss in many places. Getting help is much harder.

I do not know what OpenAI and other companies will do about it and I do not expect them to jump in to solve such a complex social issue. But perhaps this inspires other founders who may want to build a company to tackle this at scale. Focusing on help, not profits. This is not easy, but some folks will take such challenges. I choose to believe that.

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