Bridging the Disclosure Gap: AI’s Potential Role in Suicide Prevention

AI Summary

General purpose AI receives increasing disclosures of suicidal thoughts but often offers unsafe or harmful responses despite improving risk assessment.
AI fails to motivate disclosure to another person, a critical step for obtaining safety, support, and clinical intervention.
Urgent need for empirically grounded, disclosure focused interventions in AI; developers and policymakers must act to advance suicide prevention.

Psychiatr Serv. 2026 Jun 16:appips20250521. doi: 10.1176/appi.ps.20250521. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) tools-specifically, general-purpose large language models-are increasingly used by individuals to disclose suicidal thoughts. Although these platforms can assess suicide risk with growing accuracy, they are not reliably equipped to respond effectively and often even provide harmful or unsafe guidance. Current AI systems fail to motivate disclosure of suicide risk to another person, a necessary step for safety and support. The authors draw attention to this gap and argue for the need to integrate disclosure-focused interventions into AI tools, offering an empirically grounded direction for developers and policymakers to advance suicide prevention in the context of this rapidly evolving technology.

PMID:42298343 | DOI:10.1176/appi.ps.20250521

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