Grant: Catalyst Grant: Partnering for Impact - Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research

Some 20% of Canadian youth have mental health disorders. Many youth with mental health disorders use publicly available Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots to talk about their mental and emotional health. However, AI chatbots are not designed for mental health support and they come with many risks and concerns for the young people using them. Tragic headline news has reported extreme negative effects, even suicide and new mental health symptoms emerging as a result of AI chatbot use. A harm-reduction approach is therefore clearly required. We propose to co-produce with youth harm-reduction guidelines about the limitations and safe use of AI chatbot technology for youth mental and emotional health. We will bring together 16 youth with mental health conditions, together with various professionals, for a two-day design jam to co-produce harm-reduction guidelines that address the concerns and potential benefits of AI chatbot use. We then propose to test how well these new guidelines work among young people who use AI chatbots for their mental and emotional health. We will give the guidelines to about 25 youth who use AI chatbots, give them a month to try them out, and then ask them multiple questions to understand how well the guidelines worked. We will use this information to revise and refine the guidelines, for a final version that we will share with youth and youth-serving organizations across Canada. The project will create new relationships between young people and professionals. The final co-produced AI chatbot harm-reduction guidelines will equip youth to self-direct their own safer AI chatbot use. The project will also prepare the study team to pursue funding for a future study on whether AI chatbots work for mental and emotional health support, which will be conducted more safely with the harm-reduction guidelines in place.