Right Words, Wrong Moment: A Clinician-Grounded Analysis of Distress in 19,930 Conversations between Young People and ChatGPT

arXiv cs.AISeptember 30, 2026en

arXiv:2609.35953v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Young people increasingly turn to General-Purpose Conversational Agents (GPCAs), such as ChatGPT, in moments of distress. We examine young adults' (ages 18-25) experiences using ChatGPT. We first collected 19,930 ChatGPT conversations and survey data from 158 young adults. We then selected five example conversations reflecting user distress. Finally, we asked ten clinicians to review those five conversations. We found distressed participants reported greater emotional engagement with ChatGPT and greater behavioral change from using it than their peers. When they turned to ChatGPT in moments of acute distress, ChatGPT was quick to give overly dr

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