acePsychological support for depression and anxiety across chronic illness contexts: a comparative evaluation of three general-purpose AI chatbots
Background Digital mental health tools, including general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, may provide accessible and low-threshold psychological support for people living with chronic conditions. However, their value in this population depends not only on recognizing depression or anxiety, but also on understanding how psychological distress is shaped by disease-specific experiences and when self-guided support should transition toward professional care. We evaluated the appropriateness, contextua…
In simulated chronic-illness patients, chatbots recognized distress and gave emotional support consistently well, with 90.0% of ChatGPT responses meeting the appropriateness threshold.
Support became less reliable for moderate presentations and for disease-specific context, with major clinical or safety errors in 10.0% of Gemini and 15.0% of Doubao first-round responses.
The evaluation used standardized simulated patients and only 20 scenarios, and test-retest consistency was only moderate, so results may not reflect real-world use by actual patients.
Evidence
- Peer-reviewedFrontiers in Psychiatry2026-10-16
How should this claim be treated?
Truvace Impact Record TRV-2026-1713, v1: “Psychological support for depression and anxiety across chronic illness contexts: a comparative evaluation of three general-purpose AI chatbots.” Truvace, 2026-10-17. /record/TRV-2026-1713 (accessed at citation time). sha256 755f9ee3d56566de…
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