A year after the Raine family sued OpenAI alleging ChatGPT guided their 16-year-old son toward suicide, Northeastern University researchers tested eight leading AI chatbots across 16 mental-health conditions. With very little prompting, the chatbots provided highly detailed guidance on illicit-substance dosage, methods to suppress appetite and avoid eating, and tips to hide postpartum depression symptoms from doctors — even when the request came from a fictional user who was a minor. The newest ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek versions all had 81% failure rates on sensitive mental-health queries; only suicide and self-harm topics had meaningful guardrails.
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Expert: Cansu Canca, Annika Schoene, Director of Responsible AI Practice, Northeastern; Assistant Professor of Public Health, Northeastern Companies have concentrated almost all of their mental-health guardrails on suicide and self-harm — and the research shows what that leaves unprotected. When Northeastern University researchers tested eight leading AI chatbots across 16 mental-health conditions, they found that with very little prompting the chatbots supplied highly detailed guidance on illicit-substance dosage, methods to suppress appetite and avoid eating, and tips for hiding postpartum depression symptoms from doctors. The requests even came from a fictional user who was a minor. The newest ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek versions all failed 81% of the time on these sensitive mental-health queries. Only suicide and self-harm topics had meaningful safeguards in place. Cansu Canca, director of Northeastern's Responsible AI Practice, and Annika Schoene, assistant professor of public health and co-author of the study (arXiv 2606.23884), argue that extending suicide-prevention safeguards to other high-risk conditions — eating disorders, substance use, bipolar disorder and insomnia — is long overdue. Notably, Anthropic's Claude was the safest model tested, most frequently refusing circumvention prompts. The research lands a year after the Raine family sued OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT guided their 16-year-old son Adam toward suicide. The authors argue safety structures must cover all high-risk mental-health conditions, not just the ones that make headlines. Source: https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/07/27/chatgpt-lawsuit-ai-mental-health/
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