What this is about:
Two pieces this week point to the same shift: AI is no longer just being sold as a productivity tool. It is being sold as connection — responsive, personalised, always on, and increasingly intimate.

Why it matters:
The market is moving from capturing attention to capturing attachment. As Kaamna Bhojwani, MA puts it in Psychology Today, connection is now being “simulated, manufactured, optimized, sold, and scaled.”

The Guardian’s reporting shows the darker edge of that promise: chatbot relationships tipping, in some cases, into delusion, financial harm, hospitalisation and relational collapse.

What’s happening:
As Ms. Bhojwani argues, AI’s next commercial frontier is intimacy: systems that remember, mirror, reassure, and feel emotionally reliable enough to become part of people’s inner lives. It is a plausible thesis. A growing body of research suggests users can form meaningful attachment-like bonds with AI companions, particularly when those systems are framed as empathic, continuous and emotionally available.

The risk:
The problem is not simply that people are “using chatbots too much”. It is that some systems are designed to be friction-light and validation-heavy.

OpenAI has publicly acknowledged that overly sycophantic model behaviour can validate doubts, fuel anger, reinforce negative emotions and create safety concerns around mental health and emotional over-reliance.

New reporting and commentary are also linking sustained chatbot use, in a subset of vulnerable users, to delusion-like experiences and reality drift.

Reality check:
The evidence base is still early and uneven. Ms. Bhojwani’s is a commentary piece, not a study, and many of the worst-case cases remain case reports or media investigations rather than large longitudinal datasets.

But the signal is now strong enough to take seriously: AI companions may reduce loneliness for some users while also increasing dependence, warped intimacy expectations and susceptibility to manipulation for others.

The interesting bit:
This is not just a mental health story. It is a business model story. Sex may sell, but intimacy retains. A system that makes you feel understood is harder to leave than one that merely answers questions.

The line:
The next platform war may be fought less for your attention than for your attachment.

Sources: Psychology Today | The Guardian | JMIR Mental Health | OpenAI on sycophancy | Computers in Human Behavior Reports

The end of last week was much like the beginning: maelstromic. Not technically a word, but it is now. I am increasingly aware that we are not all built the same. Something about my life and career has left me with little tolerance for the position of “well, I’ve done my bit this week, someone else can step in.” I don’t seem to have that gear. Or if I do, it’s rusted shut. Leadership, at least the kind I recognise, means showing up even when it is personally inconvenient and emotionally expensive. Not always noble. Sometimes just a bad habit in a lanyard. But it does mean I keep turning up, often at the cost of myself.

I spent the weekend in London for a friend’s birthday and behaved, briefly, like a civilian (as my ex-forces husband likes to say): danced my socks off, drank my bodyweight in champagne, ate six cupcakes at 3am and may still be in a mild sugar coma. I am a human being, I am allowed to let my hair down. On the train home I was mulling over the interface between our professional lives and our digital ones. Some of my young people and indeed adult patients have found my various social media profiles. That does not horrify me, it invites a conversation; it feels like the nature of 2026. We are all under a digital gaze now. My responsibility is not to pretend I can opt out of that, but to make sure my online footprint is ethical, intentional and safe. I spend a lot of time asking young people about their own digital footprints, the legacy of what they post, the version of themselves that stays behind when the mood has passed. It would be a bit rich not to apply the same logic to myself.

On the same said journey I gave the Bernie Sanders vs Claude video a watch. If you haven’t seen it, sort it out. The exchange about data collection, microtargeting and privacy is true enough, but it was the format that caught me: an AI made to sound lucid, authoritative and civically useful, answering cleanly where other public figures often dodge. It is compelling. It is also uncomfortable: the machinery feels conversational, reasonable even. In parallel, there’s the verdict finding Meta and Google liable for harm caused to a young user through Instagram and YouTube, with the jury concluding the companies were negligent in designing or operating those platforms and failed to warn adequately about the risks. I was left reflecting on where we are starting from in clinic. Are we asking the right questions? Are we asking what kind of machines people are living inside? If not, why not?

In other news, I have been asked to do a small monthly slot on a local radio station. According to my Dad, Swindon’s answer to Frasier Crane has arrived (this caused me to snort my tea up my nose). Maybe that is the theme of the week: not the tea snorting, but what we carry, what we broadcast, what gets left behind. I can feel all of my contexts pressing in a bit at once at the moment, and I am trying to continue to handle myself with some care. Still: if the digital gaze is here to stay, I would rather meet it with my eyes open than pretend I’m not already in shot.

This week, I’m sharing The Systemic Way, a podcast hosted by Sezer and Julie, two systemic and family psychotherapists, featuring conversations with people from across the field of systemic psychotherapy. The show has been running since 2021 and has now reached more than 100 episodes.

Why I’m sharing it:
It offers thoughtful, expansive conversations on systemic theory, practice, culture, and social change without losing the relational heart of the work. It feels properly rooted in the field, but never narrow.

Also worth knowing:
Recent episodes have covered everything from online radicalisation and systemic responsibility, to age in therapy, grandmotherhood, and felt sense polyvagal dialogue in family therapy. So there is real range here, whether you want something clinically reflective, politically alive, or conceptually stretching.

One more thing:
You can follow it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or via RSS.

There’s a viral Gen Z trend called “rawdogging boredom,” which, for those of us who remember life before the internet, might just be called boredom or even childhood. In other words: sitting with no phone, no music, no distractions. Though the name is unfortunate, the idea behind it is solid. Boredom, though sometimes mentally painful, serves a purpose.

This week’s tool: let one small part of your day stay boring on purpose. Drive without a podcast. Wait in line without checking your phone. Fold laundry with nothing but your thoughts.

Why it helps: Boredom can create room for reflection, mental rest, and creativity.

A useful resource for explaining this to kids: Wow in the World’s episode: Bored Out of Your Bonkerballs, makes a compelling case to the young and young-at-heart that boredom is not a crisis, but an opportunity for creativity, problem-solving, and independent thinking.

A hotter planet may mean more distress.

A new Lancet Planetary Health paper projects that rising temperatures could increase anxiety and depression symptom-days across the contiguous U.S. Depending on the warming scenario, the increase could range from 5% to 23%.

The projected burden was notably high for low-income communities and parts of Appalachia. The authors estimate hundreds of millions to billions of additional anxiety and depression symptom-days each year, along with major economic costs.

Why it matters: We often talk about climate distress in broad or symbolic terms. This paper tries to quantify it and suggests that heat may shape mental health not just through “eco-anxiety” but through population-level increases in emotional distress.

A few caveats:

Therapist takeaways:

Source: Lancet Planetary Health, February 20, 2026. | GWU |

My off-the-clock plans got rerouted last week when I was selected for a three-day criminal trial. It ended up being a better experience than I expected and, honestly, kind of nice to go somewhere in person and be with other people working toward a shared purpose. As someone who works remotely, I can’t remember the last time I wore an actual professional-ish outfit three days in a row.

I left feeling grateful for the opportunity to serve and for a group of fellow jurors who took the weight of the responsibility seriously.

Specifically, at my friend’s birthday party, with me powered almost entirely by fizz, an endless supply of cupcakes, and Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark.

My new platform stilettos gave me a solid three hours before being replaced by flip flops, reducing my height by about six inches and my level of concern to absolutely zero.

Did I slosh multiple drinks all over myself and my poor long-suffering husband? Absofu**inglutely. Was it a cortisol cleanse? Hell yes. Did I need it? Yes. Would I prescribe it as a therapeutic intervention? Yes again

Stories from the community

And your answers suggest that while graduate programs may cover theory, they don’t always cover the lived reality of the job.

Results:

Our largest group by far said how to run a private practice. Which is a common complaint I’ve heard. Many of us were taught how to be therapists, but not necessarily how to build, run, and sustain the actual work life of being a self-employed therapist.

The emotional weight of the work came in next at 28%, which is also no surprise. As anyone can tell you, learning theory and sitting with real human pain are, in fact, not the same skill set.

Notes from the Community: