On Thursday 9th July 2026 I sat in the audience for the launch of Mind’s Mental Health in the Age of AI Commission. Here are some thoughts provoked by that evening.
On the face of it, “AI and mental health” sounds like it fits neatly around a panel and a commission. In practice, it spills out of health care into a messy overlap of consumer protection, online safety, public-service design, and the raw capacity of health services. The tidy categories of policy do not hold up particularly well against the lives people actually live.
After the panel I joined a breakout group focused on regulation. The conversation flowed well and we discussed the Online Safety Act and the boundary of responsibility between users and systems; where the MHRA’s role starts and stops; how to restrain actors who have no intention of behaving well, and what to do about those who say the right things while taking unacceptable risks.
And one conclusion seems hard to avoid: AI is already part of our mental health ecosystem, whether or not the tools being used describe themselves that way.
It fills the gaps left by waiting lists. Someone might use it to prepare for a GP appointment. A conversation about employment might be rooted in the ways their mental health is a work-limiting condition. Someone who doesn’t think they’re ill enough to ask for help, is too ashamed to ask, or has asked before and had a bad experience, might well be typing instead.
So arguments about whether people should use AI for mental health are largely academic. The reality has outpaced them: people are using it.
The harder question is what happens when that use takes place through tools and services that do not think of themselves as mental health services at all. Because “AI” isn’t one thing. It ranges from regulated clinical technologies and purpose built tools to general purpose chatbots and AI embedded in services designed for something else. Their risks are not identical, but people move between them far more easily and quickly than regulation does.
Mind’s Commission begins in that blurred reality, asking how AI is changing help-seeking and support pathways, how people can be kept safe, and what it means for inequality in access and experience.
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