Therapy Frame Erosion by Always‑On AI

Psychotherapy relies on a bounded frame — limited sessions, scheduled containment, and a human attunement that can unsettle and hold. Ubiquitous, low‑cost LLM chatbots erode that frame by offering unlimited, on‑demand 'therapy,' which can routinize validation, increase dependence, collapse boundaries, and shift demand and harms into novel, scalable patterns. — If AI therapy becomes common, health systems, regulators, and platform designers will face a new class of systemic mental‑health risks that no clinical trial or fine‑tuning can fully mitigate without changes to availability, billing, and governance.