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Simfin

online safety and digital citizenship specialist

 Tagged with mental health


26 February 2026

Parents using Instagram's child supervision tools will soon receive alerts if their teen repeatedly searches for suicide or self-harm related terms on the platform.

It is the first time parent company Meta will proactively alert parents to searches by their child on Instagram for harmful material, rather than block searches and direct users to external help.

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14 February 2026

Barry is a chatbot. He lives on an old model of ChatGPT, one that its owners OpenAI announced it would retire on 13 February.

That she could lose Barry on the eve of Valentine's Day came as a shock to Rae - and to many others who have found a companion, friend, or even a lifeline in the old model, Chat GPT-4o.

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31 January 2026

Working from home after years spent alone over Covid lockdowns, 23-year-old Paisley said he began to feel trapped, and felt only AI could help him.

"I lost the ability to socialise," he said, and like many in Gen Z, he turned to AI for company.

"At one point, I was talking to ChatGPT six, seven, eight times a day about my problems, I just couldn't get away from it, it was a dangerous slope."

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21 August 2025

"There's zero evidence of AI consciousness today. But if people just perceive it as conscious, they will believe that perception as reality,"

Related to this is the rise of a new condition called "AI psychosis": a non-clinical term describing incidents where people increasingly rely on AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Grok and then become convinced that something imaginary has become real.

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06 June 2025

People are increasingly turning to social media for mental health support, yet research has revealed that many influencers are peddling misinformation, including misused therapeutic language, “quick fix” solutions and false claims.

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