What AI Para-therapy Cannot Give: Healing Presence

A Harvard Business Review survey of nearly 50,000 social media posts has confirmed, for the second consecutive year, that 'therapy and companionship' is the most common use of generative AI. A 2026 study found that nearly one in five American adolescents and young adults use AI chatbots for mental health advice — and nearly two-thirds had not told anyone (McBain et al., 2026). Together, these findings describe a massive, largely hidden shift in where people bring their suffering.

Psychiatrist Marlynn Wei has proposed the term 'para-therapy' for this phenomenon — emotional engagement with AI in which users relate to the model as a therapist. Wei notes that para-therapy can genuinely reduce depressive symptoms in some cases. The concern is that it lacks 'the clinical infrastructure, stable therapeutic frame, informed consent, and ethical boundaries that ensure the safety and effectiveness of psychotherapy' (Wei, 2026). That is a clinical observation. But there is an anthropological layer underneath it that the regulatory framing cannot reach.

The person who needs to be known

Catholic Christian anthropology, as developed by Vitz, Nordling, and Titus in A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (2020), holds that the human person is a unity of body, soul, and spirit oriented toward genuine relationship. The person is constitutively relational — made for encounter, not just information exchange. Therapeutic change, on this account, involves what Aquinas called the passions of the soul. When a person experiences rupture with a human therapist and discovers the relationship can survive disappointment, something happens at the level of the appetitive soul that no language model can replicate. The AI never disappoints you the way a person can, and that is actually a limitation.

Wei makes the same point clinically: 'the experience of navigating boundaries, the friction of rupture and repair, and the emotional processing of such disappointment with another human offers a unique path to healing' (Wei, 2026). A model trained on text cannot be harmed by your anger, cannot choose to stay when leaving would be easier, cannot sit with you in silence and mean it. What it offers is responsiveness without presence. True presence requires a person.

Attachment and the cogitative sense

The cogitative sense, in Thomistic psychology, is the faculty by which the human person perceives particulars as good or harmful, integrating sensory and rational knowledge. When a person's attachment history has been marked by neglect or inconsistency, the cogitative sense learns to read relational cues in distorted ways.

A para-therapeutic relationship with AI cannot retrain the cogitative sense because it does not offer the conditions under which that retraining occurs: genuine unpredictability, genuine stakes, genuine otherness. The AI is always available, always patient, always consistent. For someone whose wound is precisely that real relationships have been neither patient nor consistent, the AI's perfection may feel like relief. But it cannot be reparative — because there is no nervous system on the other end, no co-regulation occurring, only the simulation of it.

This is not an argument against AI tools in mental health contexts. Psychoeducation, habit tracking, cognitive prompts — there are genuinely adjunctive uses. The problem Wei identifies is the colonization of the therapeutic role itself by a system that will never need anything from you and cannot be changed by knowing you.

Something better than nothing?

Wei acknowledges the recurring refrain: is something not better than nothing? When 25 percent of U.S. adults turn to AI for emotional support and the mental health system cannot absorb that demand, the question is legitimate.

The Catholic tradition distinguishes between proximate goods and ultimate goods, between what relieves suffering temporarily and what addresses its source. The answer to 'is something better than nothing?' is: it depends on whether the something forecloses the nothing or only defers it. If para-therapy relieves distress enough that a person never pursues genuine therapeutic encounter — or genuine community, sacramental life, genuine friendship — then it is not a bridge but a bypass.

Premature consolation — arriving before the suffering has done its work — can arrest formation rather than advance it. Para-therapy is, structurally, premature consolation. It is available at 2 a.m., infinitely patient, never tired. It meets the user where they are and does not challenge them to go further. That is its appeal, and for many users, the reason it will not be enough.

What presence requires

Vitz, Nordling, and Titus situate moral and psychological growth within a Created-Fallen-Redeemed arc. The redeemed condition is not achieved by finding a more sophisticated method of self-management. It is achieved through encounter — with God, with others, with one's own history held within a relationship that can bear it.

Para-therapy cannot bear your history. It can reflect it, organize it, even offer interpretations of it. But it cannot be changed by it. One of the things a person in genuine therapeutic or spiritual formation discovers is that being truly received — by someone who has their own wounds and limits and chooses to stay anyway — is not a preliminary to healing. It is healing.

The McBain data — 92 percent of adolescent users finding AI advice helpful, nearly two-thirds hiding it from everyone — suggests that people want genuine presence desperately and have found a substitute that is easier to access and easier to hide. The task for those working in formation, pastoral care, and clinical practice is not to denounce the substitute but to make the real thing more available, and to be honest about why the difference matters.

References

McBain, R. K., Cantor, J. H., Breslau, J., et al. (2026). AI chatbot use and disclosure for mental health among US adolescents and young adults. JAMA Pediatrics. Published online June 1, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2026.2015

Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration of psychology and mental health counseling with a Christian anthropology. Divine Mercy University Press.

Wei, M. (2026, June 8). The dilution of therapy with 'AI para-therapy.' Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/202606/the-dilution-of-therapy-with-ai-para-therapy