This section touches on death by suicide and how AI tools intersect with that risk. If today isn’t the right day to read this, please skip or come back when you have more capacity.

This week, we’re taking a closer look at ChatGPT’s new “Help Is Available” helpline prompts, the pop-ups that appear when the system detects distress in a user’s message.

We’re unpacking what these prompts actually offer, where the gaps are, and what we believe needs to be in place before distressed young people or adults engage with AI companions at all.

OpenAI Help Center (Crisis Helplines).
ChatGPT, Sora, and Atlas will now display a “Help is available” prompt when distress is detected. The prompt routes users to independent services like 988 (U.S.) or Find A Helpline (global). OpenAI makes two things clear about privacy:

This distinction matters for user expectations and professional trust.

The prompts themselves do some things well:

If someone is actively distressed or suicidal, AI companions can increase risk. Ethical design requires safety measures before the first message. That includes:

If an AI platform cannot provide these, the safest recommendation is straightforward: do not allow or encourage use of the platform in moments of crisis.

Across November, I swam 25,000 metres for our local hospice. Fundraising, it seems, is able to shove me past what I think I am capable of: it turns out my body will keep going long after my head says, “ok Love, that’s enough now.” A bonus being that in the water, my brain, which is usually running multiple tabs at once, shuts up.

I stopped my swim routine in May when our dog Minnie died. The silence of the pool made the grief unbearably loud. Getting back into that pool with a purpose meant I could both miss her (and my more recently deceased dog, Fatima, for that matter) and raise money for people who need the hospice. The swimming hasn’t taken the sadness away, but it has given it somewhere to go. It feels less like I’m drowning in it and more like I’m carrying it with me. It’s not peace exactly, but it’s a better truce with my own head than I’ve managed for a while.

There have been some practical learnings too. If you don’t rinse your swimsuit properly after each swim, the chlorine will eat it alive. I am now two cossies down. And turns out my cat loves chlorine and is obsessed with my post swim self; she has taken to demanding to groom me on my return home; slightly gross but I’ll take it…..given the most I usually get is biscuits being made on my face at 5 am or shade thrown at me from my husband’s lap.

I turned thirty-nine over the weekend. There’s been a chorus of “ooh, one year closer to forty,” as if forty were some sort of cliff edge. And ‘ouf now you’re middle-aged’. To this I say, what a load of absolute crap, middle-aged my ass- my Dad’s 94, so come at me again when I’m 50. I mostly feel grateful: to be here, to be well enough to swim laps for a hospice, to have people and animals I love enough to grieve. What does forty or indeed any age even mean, beyond more of this sometimes ordinary, sometimes bloody hard, and yet often lovely life to keep choosing on purpose?

A new study in Nature Mental Health tested whether unexpected events could increase prosocial behavior in real-life settings. Researchers observed 138 metro rides in Milan, Italy. In the control condition, a female experimenter who appeared pregnant boarded the train; in the experimental condition, Batman stepped on from another door.

Passengers offered their seats nearly double the time when Batman was present (37.66% of the time vs 67.21%). Interestingly, 44% of the helpers in the Batman condition reported not seeing Batman at all, and none attributed their behavior to his presence.

The authors suggest that unexpected, non-threatening disruptions like this may pull people out of routine, increase momentary awareness, or trigger subtle social contagion, which nudges them toward prosocial behavior even outside conscious awareness.

So this week’s tool is this: a reminder that breaking autopilot, even briefly, can open up space for kindness, creativity, and relational attunement in ways we aren't always aware of.

A well-timed disruption can do for us what Alfred does for Bruce Wayne: quietly guide us toward our better selves.

This week’s Spotlight features Save the Therapist, a free podcast-style CE platform created by Tobin Richardson, EdD, NCC, with a simple mission: high-quality continuing education that never hides behind a paywall.

Here’s what stood out to us:

In a field where “free” can make us suspicious, this is one resource that earns our trust.

Save the Therapist found here.

From now until Christmas, I’ve re-committed to doing my morning pages (again). This Artist’s Way ritual has me writing three longhand pages in my notebook first thing in the morning. It reliably clears out the mental clutter, but somewhere along the way, each year, I convince myself I’m “too busy” to do them. And now that I’ve stated my commitment here, I’ve created a large group of accountability partners. So thank you for your support.

A TV series that is a taut, queasy return to the phone-hacking years: corruption, collusion, and the casual cruelty of tabloid power. David Tennant and Robert Carlyle are superb and the ethics land with a thud.

Last year, I was invited to Hugh Grant’s ‘Hacked Off’ fringe event; I met the man himself (cue almost fainted from meeting my teenage crush), he was exactly as you’d expect (see photo above)— charming, dry, gracious, but more than that very clear on the mental health impact of those who have been hacked. Watching The Hack, reminds me why his campaign for exposing press corruption still matters.

Growing up in the nineties and early 2000s, my introduction to technology and social media was through Bebo and MSN Messenger. I didn’t have my first smartphone until I was in my third year of university. As the young people I see in clinic have told me, I am an ‘old lady’, especially when it comes to tech.

So, when in 2024 I was sat-in-teaching with other trainee psychiatrists a couple of years younger than me and heard them talking about using AI to write their portfolio reflections, I was a little shocked. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to consider having artificial intelligence do work for me; surely, that defeats the entire point of reflective practice.

Jump forward a year, and after having to navigate my own chronic illness, with an increasingly complex caseload at work, while studying for my final postgraduate exam, it became tempting to ask Microsoft Copilot to help me word my own reflective pieces and save my brain power for other things.

Then, only a few months later, I sat in front of my computer talking to an AI ‘patient’ asking it questions in practice for my final psychiatry exam (think seven minutes of quick-fire questions to reach a diagnosis). It was bizarre. It was infuriating at times. But when I needed access to simulated patients in the comfort of my own home, it worked. I also passed the exam!

What are my take-home messages? As someone who has actively used AI in my professional development and training, it has a number of benefits when used alongside traditional methods of learning. However, in my opinion, it can be glitchy, and so it requires significant discernment to learn how to integrate it into professional life smoothly and effectively

And yes, I did ask ChatGPT to give this article a title...

Here’s how our community responded:

Affirming, once again, that therapists really do contain multitudes.

Comments from the Community:

“My compassion canister is officially drained, running on fumes at this point.”