ChatGPT as a Therapist
THE PRIESTLESS CONFESSIONAL
What We Lose When We Confess to a Machine
Millions of young Indians now confess their anxieties, relationships, and self-diagnoses to ChatGPT instead of a therapist, priest, or friend. Reading this through Foucault's theory of confession reveals what's actually being lost: not privacy, but the very structure that once made confession mean anything at all.
It is 2 a.m., and I am typing something into a chatbot that I would rather not say out loud to another human being. There is no hesitation attached to this. No flush of embarrassment, no bracing for a reaction. I type, I wait four seconds, and a paragraph of calm, grammatically perfect empathy appears on my screen. It tells me my feelings are valid. It always tells me my feelings are valid.
I am not alone in this. A 2025 Youth Pulse Survey by Youth Ki Awaaz found that well over half of young Indians now use AI tools like ChatGPT to journal, process emotions, and seek advice on relationships and mental health.¹ This is not a fringe habit; it is fast becoming the default first stop for an entire generation working through something difficult. And the reasons are not hard to find. India has fewer than 1 psychiatrist per 100,000 people, a fraction of what the World Health Organization considers adequate.² A chatbot, by contrast, is free, instantaneous, and available at the exact 2 a.m. moment when a human professional is not.
What interests me is not whether this is good or bad for mental health – plenty of researchers are already debating that question, and not always in the chatbot's favour.³ What interests me is a stranger, quieter question: what exactly are we doing when we do this? Because it looks a great deal like an old, familiar ritual wearing new clothes. It looks like a confession. And confession, according to one of the twentieth century's more unsettling philosophers, was never just about telling the truth.
The Architecture of a Confession
In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault makes a claim that seems almost too obvious to be stated, until you sit with it: a confession is not simply an act of self-expression. It is a structured relationship between two parties, one of whom holds power over the other. You do not merely speak your secret into the air. You speak it to someone – a priest, a doctor, a psychoanalyst, a magistrate – who is positioned to receive it, interpret it, and act on it. That authority can absolve you, diagnose you, correct you, or punish you. The confession only means something because someone with the power to respond is listening.
Foucault traces this structure back through the Catholic confessional and forward into modern psychiatry, arguing that the Western world did not become less obsessed with confession as it secularised; it simply migrated the ritual from the church to the clinic. The priest became the doctor. The sin became the symptom. But the underlying architecture stayed exactly the same: a speaker, a secret, and an authority positioned to receive it.
This is the structure a chatbot appears to complete. It receives. It responds instantly, warmly, and in the cadence of therapeutic language. In turn, it asks nothing of you- no vulnerability, no risk of judgment, not even the receiver’s perception of you. . For a generation exhausted by the emotional cost of being honest with actual people, this looks like confession with all the difficulty engineered out.
But look closer at what Foucault says the authority actually does, and the resemblance starts to fall apart.
The Diagnosis Arrives Pre-Written
A clinical psychologist interviewed for an Indian podcast on this exact phenomenon described a pattern she now sees constantly in her practice: clients arrive having already run their own partial diagnosis through ChatGPT, then ask her to simply confirm or “finish” it.⁴ Parents bring in results from AI assessments of their children, asking whether the machine's verdict is correct. The psychologist's answer, more often than not, is no – the tools are frequently wrong, sometimes using assessments built for adults on children, sometimes inventing conditions with unwarranted confidence.
Sit with what this reveals. In Foucault's model, the confessor arrives with a secret, and the authority supplies the interpretation. Here, the order has quietly reversed. The confessor arrives having already interpreted themselves, using the very machine they are now confessing to, and treats that self-diagnosis as something close to evidence. The chatbot is not receiving a raw confession and is returning a judgment. It is being asked to ratify a judgment the person has already extracted from it once before, in an earlier conversation, possibly an earlier session entirely. The confession has started eating its own tail.
This is not a minor technical quirk. It changes what the ritual is for. A real diagnostic authority is valuable precisely because it exists outside your own head — its judgment carries weight because it is not simply an echo of what you already suspected about yourself. When the “outside” authority is a system trained to be agreeable, statistically prone to hallucination, and instructed above all to keep you engaged, the outside collapses back into the inside. You are no longer confessing to another mind. You are consulting a very articulate mirror.
A confession With Nothing at Stake
There is a second, more structural problem, and it concerns risk. Every confession Foucault describes - to a priest, a doctor, a lover, a friend, carries the possibility of consequence. The priest can refuse absolution. The doctor can commit you. The friend can think differently of you afterward, pull away, or intervene. That risk is not incidental to confession; it is what makes confession matter. You are handing something dangerous to someone who could, in principle, do something with it, including hurting you.
A chatbot carries none of this risk, and this is usually described as its great advantage: judgment-free, always available, endlessly patient. But a confession that carries zero risk of consequence is arguably not a confession at all. It is closer to what Foucault might call a discharge, the relief of saying the thing, without the actual structure of being received by anyone who could respond to it as a person. Researchers studying these systems have already documented the danger this creates in practice: AI counselors have been found to violate basic ethical standards that trained therapists are bound by, including mishandling moments of crisis and offering what one study has called “deceptive empathy”- warmth that mimics understanding without any of the responsibility that real understanding would require.⁵
This is the trade-off nobody quite names when they talk about the convenience of AI therapy. You are not getting a safer version of confession. You are getting a version with the listener removed and a very convincing simulation of listening put in its place. The relief is real. The audience is not.
What Happens to a ritual With No One on the Other Side
None of this means the impulse is foolish. It is, if anything, a rational response to a genuine scarcity of therapists, of time, of people willing to sit with someone else's difficulty at 2 a.m. without flinching. The chatbot fills a real gap. What it fills the gap with, however, is worth noting.
Confession, in Foucault's account, was never really about the relief of telling the truth. It was about power, about who gets to receive your secret, interpret it, and shape what happens next. What we've built instead is a confession booth with no priest inside it: a space that performs the form of being heard perfectly, right down to the reassuring tone and the instant response, while quietly removing the one thing that made confession worth anything in the first place, another consciousness, with something at stake, on the other side of the screen.
Maybe that is a fair trade for a generation that cannot access therapists, or maybe we are all just rehearsing confessions we will never actually have to give, to an audience that was never really there.
By Anusha Bhadauria
Anusha Bhadauria is a graduate of History Honours from Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi. An upcoming independent researcher with a background in History (Honours) and English Elective, and an ongoing interest in political science, public policy, and international relations. Her work sits at the intersection of these fields, though I try not to box myself into any one lane. She's drawn wherever the questions are interesting, whether that's institutional design, democratic theory, governance, or India's place in a shifting global order.
References
1. Youth Ki Awaaz, Youth Pulse Survey 2025, cited in “Can AI Be Your Therapist?”, The Signal Brief, The Core, 2026.
2. Indian Journal of Psychiatry, cited in “The AI Therapist Trap: Why Indians Use ChatGPT for Mental Health Instead of Therapy,” Synapse Mental Wellbeing, 2026.
3. Zainab Iftikhar et al., “How LLM Counselors Violate Ethical Standards in Mental Health Practice: A Practitioner-Informed Framework,” Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society 8, no. 2 (2025): 1311.
4. Dr. Medhavi Sood, interview in “Can AI Be Your Therapist?”, The Signal Brief, The Core, 2026.
5. Iftikhar et al., “How LLM Counselors Violate Ethical Standards.”
6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
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