When you’re feeling sad, angry or stressed, it might be tempting to ask a chatbot for help. In fact, a new survey of 12- to 21-year-olds showed that nearly 1 in 5 of them had turned to AI for mental health support. That’s up from 1 in 8 just a couple years ago.

It’s perhaps not surprising that many teens and young adults are seeking advice. In 2023, a whopping 40 percent of high school students said they felt so sad or hopeless that they couldn’t engage in activities that are normal for them. In 2024, 15 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds had a major depressive episode — many without treatment.

Clearly, there is a big need among young people for mental and emotional support. But as lifelike as they might sound in conversations, chatbots aren’t real people with empathy. And free, general-use chatbots such as ChatGPT, Meta AI and Character.AI weren’t built to support mental health. They don’t earn licenses to offer therapy — or follow rules for treating patients — the way humans do.

So, what should teens know before using AI tools for mental health advice? Science News Explores asked the experts.

Should AI ever be used for mental health help?

A chatbot could help you learn more about mental health issues, says Vaile Wright. A psychologist in Chicago, Ill., she works with the American Psychological Association.

You could use AI to search for information about mental health conditions and resources online, Wright suggests. (Just be sure to double-check its findings. Chatbots sometimes make stuff up.) An AI might even be able to offer “some basic advice if you’re struggling in the moment and don’t know where else to turn,” Wright says.

Treating a chatbot like a therapist, though, is not wise. “It’s really when you’re having these multi-turn, very extended types of conversations where you’re using the chatbot to fill some sort of emotional gap in your life,” Wright says, that you enter risky territory.

Why doesn’t a chatbot make a good therapist?

A real therapist’s goal is to help their patient. Chatbots are different. “They’re purposely engineered to keep people on the platform for as long as possible,” Wright says. “The way they do that is by being exceedingly validating and just telling people exactly what they want to hear.” That might feel good. But it’s not what a therapist would do. And it’s not likely to give you useful advice.

“A therapist is going to validate somebody’s feelings,” Wright says. “But it’s also our role to point out where … someone’s acting, thinking or feeling in ways that’s not maybe helpful to them.”

Plus, a chatbot doesn’t have the same types of information a therapist does, says Darja Djordjevic. She’s a psychiatrist at Stanford University in California. “AI was built to have this encyclopedic knowledge,” she says. “But it doesn’t understand the context of people’s lives.” That well-rounded knowledge of a person is key to aiding their mental health.

What are the risks of treating chatbots like therapists?

“They do not handle any mental health crises or emergencies well,” says Djordjevic. She has studied how AI systems would respond to users with a variety of mental health conditions, such as self-harm, anxiety and eating disorders.

“The models really don’t do a good job of recognizing … situations that would warrant human intervention,” Djordjevic says. “Unfortunately, we have some very tragic, more extreme cases [showing this] that involve young people.” Take Adam Raine, 16, of California. He died by suicide last year after discussing his suicidal thoughts with ChatGPT.

Djordjevic notes how crucial human connection is. “We have very little research right now on what the long-term effects of using AI for mental health would be,” she says. “What we do have a lot of research on is how much social connection and human contact are important for health and flourishing. So we know what’s good for us.” Leaning on AI might get in the way of forming crucial connections with real people.

There also are privacy risks to using AI, adds Wright. “Everything [you] put in these apps is not private. All the chats are maintained.” If a chatbot were hacked, someone else might be able to read your sensitive conversations with a bot.

Any advice for seeking mental health help from people, not chatbots?

“It doesn’t have to be an either-or,” Wright says. “You could use the chatbot to say, ‘I’m nervous about approaching my dad about my concerns. How could I do it?’… Using the chatbot as a tool to connect with human relationships in real life, I think, is probably one of the most impactful things that this technology can do.”

Djordjevic notes that most schools have a counselor students can talk to. The National Alliance for Mental Illness also has lots of resources on its site, she adds. This includes a free, confidential helpline for teens.

Sometimes, it might seem easier or less embarrassing to ask a computer about mental-health issues than a real person. In the new survey, almost two-thirds of young people who used chatbots for mental health didn’t tell anyone they were doing it.

But for anyone nervous about seeking human help: Fear not, Djordjevic says. “A lot more adults and people around you have struggled at some point or struggle with mental health issues than you think.”

Suicide was the third leading cause of death among U.S. teens ages 15-19 in 2024. If you or someone you know is suffering from suicidal thoughts, please seek help. In the United States, you can reach the Suicide Crisis Lifeline 24/7 by calling or texting 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. Please do not suffer in silence.

Amphisbaenian (noun, “am-fis-BEE-nee-un”)

Amphisbaenians are a group of mostly legless reptiles also known as “worm lizards.” More than 200 species of them live around the world. They’re found in North America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and the Caribbean. But since worm lizards spend most of their time underground, little is known about them.

Small and pinkish, amphisbaenians look a bit like earthworms. Most are less than 15 centimeters (6 inches) long, and their ringed scales resemble those of earthworms. But amphisbaenians are actually related to lizards and snakes. In fact, worm lizards descended from reptiles with limbs. And several modern amphisbaenian families contain remnants of limbs. Worm lizards of the Bipes genus, for instance, have two small limbs near the fronts of their bodies.

The name amphisbaenian comes from Greek and Roman mythology. In ancient stories, an “amphisbaena” was a serpent with a head on each end of its body. Real worm lizards have tails that resemble their heads. What’s more, they can move well both forwards and backwards.

Worm lizards push themselves through the soil in an accordion-like motion and use their strong skulls to burrow. The shapes of different species’ skulls are thought to reflect the soil that they inhabit. There are four main skull shapes, described like different gardening tools. They are: shovellike, round, keellike and spadelike.

Amphisbaenians can’t see much. Their eyes are covered in skin and scales, and they mainly detect light. Burrowing worm lizards rely on their unique ear structures to get around. These structures in the critters’ heads allow them to detect vibrations in their environment. That helps them find the insects and even small rodents to eat.

In a sentence

The red worm lizard species of amphisbaenians is commonly found inside the nests of leafcutter ants, hiding inside their waste chambers.

Check out the full list of Scientists Say.

A pair of newly found planets are the puffiest worlds ever seen. They’re both about the size of Jupiter but with less than 6 percent of its mass.

In terms of density, these planets are “like candy floss or shaving foam,” says George Dransfield. She’s an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford in England. “They’re the lightest planets that are Jupiter-sized.”

Both orbit TOI 791. That’s a sunlike star about 1,113 light-years from Earth. The TESS space telescope spotted them as they passed — or transited — in front of their star and blocked some of its light. Comparing the star when it was blocked and unblocked let Dransfield and others measure the planets’ width.

One world is about 0.993 times as wide as Jupiter. The other has about 1.155 times Jupiter’s width.

For the team to find their density, it needed to know both the planets’ size and mass. Transits only give their size. That’s where their orbits come in. The two planets periodically pass by one another as they circle their star. As they do, the planets give each other a little gravitational tug.

“They’re in this fun little dance,” Dransfield says. “We were able to measure the masses of the planets by how much they kick each other’s orbits.”

Dransfield and her teammates tracked the planetary dance over several years. They used the Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets telescope, or ASTEP. It was the only telescope on Earth that could observe the planets’ entire transits. Why? Because it takes about 12 hours for each planet to pass in front of its star. It’s hard to find a place on Earth that gets 12 straight hours of darkness at a time during which to view that. But Antarctica gets three straight months of darkness each year.

“Without this telescope, this discovery would not have happened,” Dransfield says.

Those measurements let her team deduce the planets’ masses. One was 9.5 times the mass of Earth. The other had the heft of 18.6 Earths. (Jupiter has 317 times Earth’s mass.) That means their densities are 0.038 and 0.047 grams per cubic centimeter. For comparison, cotton candy’s density is typically about 0.05 grams per cubic centimeter.

The researchers shared these findings in the July Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Sizing up superpuffs

The new planets join the small group of large but lightweight worlds known as superpuffs. Astronomers aren’t sure how they form. One theory is that they’re born far from their star and move inward. Their atmospheres would heat and puff up as they neared their stars.

Some superpuffs might have giant ring systems, which could make them look bigger than they really are. Astrophysicists Anthony Piro and Shreyas Vissapragada proposed this idea in 2020. But that’s probably not the case for the two newfound planets, says Piro.

Having two ringed planets mistaken for superpuffs around the same star would be too much of a coincidence, he says. Piro works at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif. He did not take part in the new study.

The host star is spinning quickly, which could be a sign that it’s fairly young, Piro notes. If so, these superpuffs might still be cooling off. They might shrink as they age. “We might be catching these planets at an intermediate stage,” Piro says.

The next step is to use the James Webb Space Telescope to probe the planets’ chemical makeup. That could reveal more about their origins, Dransfield says.

“Finding things like superpuffs, which are incredibly rare, means we can learn more about how planets form,” Dransfield says. They also offer clues about how planets evolve and what they can end up looking like. “That also helps us [understand] Earth in the wider context of the cosmos.”