Founding Clinician Pilot
A bounded 60-minute educational session for mental-health clinicians who are already encountering client use of conversational AI for emotional processing, reassurance, companionship, decision support, and identity exploration.
The Clinical Problem
Clinicians need neutral, non-shaming language for distinguishing supportive use, destabilizing patterns, ordinary situational overwhelm, and standard clinical risk. The pilot expands clinical inquiry without inventing a new diagnosis or replacing existing assessment frameworks.
One Audience
Designed for
The founding cohort may include therapists, counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, social workers, clinical supervisors, and clinical educators.
Not designed as
The session is educational and exploratory. It does not establish validated criteria, replace clinical judgment, or offer medical or mental-health treatment.
The 60-Minute Offer
Questions clinicians can use to ask about AI use with curiosity rather than shame, alarm, or automatic endorsement.
A way to hold pathology, situational overwhelm, and their interaction at the same time.
Proposed signals for supportive and destabilizing AI-use patterns, explicitly presented as hypotheses rather than validated criteria.
Standard escalation boundaries remain primary, including severe sleep disruption, functional decline, fixed beliefs, threats of harm, and inability to reality test.
Ways to reduce cognitive load, sort signal from noise, strengthen human connection, preserve agency, and place boundaries around high-activation AI use.
Time for clinicians to challenge the language, identify missing safeguards, surface unanswered questions, and shape the next revision.
Questions Clinicians Can Begin Asking
Use and effect
Does the interaction increase agency, connection, clarity, and action, or prolong rumination, reassurance seeking, isolation, certainty, and dependence?
Context and risk
How are external acceleration, information load, identity formation, nervous-system capacity, existing vulnerabilities, and AI interaction shaping the presentation together?
Pilot Success Condition
Success means delivering one bounded session, obtaining structured feedback, documenting objections and unanswered questions, and reaching a clear decision about revision, a second session, or institutional continuation. The first pilot is validation, not proof.