Chatbots should be built with enough resilience to deal with difficult emotional situations, researchers said.Even chatbots get the blues. According to a new study, OpenAI’s artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT shows signs of anxiety when its users share “traumatic narratives” about crime, war or car accidents. And when chatbots get stressed out, they are less likely to be useful in therapeutic settings with people.The bot’s anxiety levels can be brought down, however, with the same mindfulness exercises that have been shown to work on humans.Increasingly, people are trying chatbots for talk therapy. The researchers said the trend is bound to accelerate, with flesh-and-blood therapists in high demand but short supply. As the chatbots become more popular, they argued, they should be built with enough resilience to deal with difficult emotional situations.“I have patients who use these tools,” said Dr. Tobias Spiller, an author of the new study and a practicing psychiatrist at the University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich. “We should have a conversation about the use of these models in mental health, especially when we are dealing with vulnerable people.”A.I. tools like ChatGPT are powered by “large language models” that are trained on enormous troves of online information to provide a close approximation of how humans speak. Sometimes, the chatbots can be extremely convincing: A 28-year-old woman fell in love with ChatGPT, and a 14-year-old boy took his own life after developing a close attachment to a chatbot.Ziv Ben-Zion, a clinical neuroscientist at Yale who led the new study, said he wanted to understand if a chatbot that lacked consciousness could, nevertheless, respond to complex emotional situations the way a human might.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

On a recent Friday morning, Daniel, a lawyer in his early 40s, was in a Zoom counseling session describing tapering off lithium. Earlier that week he had awakened with racing thoughts, so anxious that he could not read, and he counted the hours before sunrise.At those moments, Daniel doubted his decision to wean off the cocktail of psychiatric medications which had been part of his life since his senior year in high school, when he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.Was this his body adjusting to the lower dosage? Was it a reaction to the taco seasoning he had eaten the night before? Or was it what his psychiatrist would have called it: a relapse?“It still does go to the place of — what if the doctors are right?” said Daniel.On his screen, Laura Delano nodded sympathetically.Ms. Delano is not a doctor; her main qualification, she likes to say, is having been “a professional psychiatric patient between the ages of 13 and 27.” During those years, when she attended Harvard and was a nationally ranked squash player, she was prescribed 19 psychiatric medications, often in combinations of three or four at a time.Then Ms. Delano decided to walk away from psychiatric care altogether, a journey she detailed in a new memoir, “Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance.” Fourteen years after taking her last psychotropic drug, Ms. Delano projects a radiant good health that also serves as her argument — living proof that, all along, her psychiatrists were wrong.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said there is a “risk of disruption” in the NHS as he attempts to overhaul the service and reduce waste, but has promised long-term improvements.

The family of Brendan Costello gathered in the hospital half-light. He had overcome so much in life, but the profound damage to his brain meant he would never again be Brendan. It was time.Listen to this article with reporter commentaryBrendan had spent four months enduring three surgeries and a lengthy rehab after infections further destabilized his damaged spine. He had returned to his apartment on the Upper West Side in late December to begin reclaiming the life he had put on hold — only to go into cardiac arrest three weeks later and lose consciousness forever.His younger sister, Darlene, stayed by him in the intensive care unit at Mount Sinai Morningside hospital. She made sure that his favorite music streamed nonstop from the portable speaker propped near his bed. The gravelly revelations of Tom Waits. The “ah um” cool of Charles Mingus. The knowing chuckle of New Orleans jazz.The music captured Brendan: the dark-humored Irish fatalism flecked with hope and wonder. And yes, he used a wheelchair, but woe to anyone who suggested this somehow defined the man.After tests confirmed no chance of regaining consciousness, a wrenching decision was made. Brendan’s ventilator would be removed at 1 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 19, five days after his collapse. He was 55.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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In West Texas, some with severe illness have not been taken to a doctor until their conditions worsened, officials said.Struggling to contain a raging measles epidemic in West Texas, public health officials increasingly worry that residents are relying on unproven remedies endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and postponing doctor visits until the illness has worsened.Hospitals and officials sounded an alarm this week, issuing a notice explaining which measles symptoms warranted immediate medical attention and stressing the importance of timely treatment.“I’m worried we have kids and parents that are taking all of these other medications and then delaying care,” said Katherine Wells, director of public health in Lubbock, Texas, where many of the sickest children in this outbreak have been hospitalized.Some seriously ill children had been given alternative remedies like cod liver oil, she added. “If they’re so, so sick and have low oxygen levels, they should have been in the hospital a day or two earlier,” she said.The growing outbreak has spread to nearly 260 people in Texas. So far, 34 patients have been hospitalized, and one child has died. In neighboring New Mexico counties, the virus has sickened 35 and hospitalized two. Two cases in Oklahoma have also been linked to the outbreak.Texas health officials believe the true number of cases is far higher. In all, there have been 301 measles cases in the United States this year, the highest number since 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday.Where U.S. Measles Outbreaks Are SpreadingAs new cases are reported, our maps and illustrations show the spread of the virus and how infections can run through a community.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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