Therabot

Randomized Trial of a Generative AI Chatbot for Mental Health Treatment

Patient / Population Intervention / Exposition Vergleich Endpunkt

In 210 adults with clinically significant depressive or generalised anxiety symptoms or at clinically high risk for feeding and eating disorders, four weeks of Therabot, an expert-fine-tuned generative-AI therapy chatbot reduced symptoms at 4 and 8 weeks compared with a waitlist control.

N
210
Design
National waitlist-controlled RCT (Dartmouth College)
Endpunkt
Symptom change from baseline to 4 weeks (post-intervention) and 8 weeks (follow-up) for MDD, GAD and CHR-FED
Relevanz
2
ErgebnisMDD symptom change −6.13 vs −2.63 at 4 wk and −7.93 vs −4.22 at 8 wk (d=0.845–0.903); GAD −2.32 vs −0.13 and −3.18 vs −1.11 (d=0.794–0.840); CHR-FED −9.83 vs −1.66 and −10.23 vs −3.70 (d=0.627–0.819). Average use >6 h; alliance rated comparable to human therapists.
Heinz MV, et al. NEJM AI. 2025;2(4):AIoa2400802. 10.1056/AIoa2400802
Diskussion & Kritik

The first RCT of a fully generative-AI therapy chatbot — large effect sizes on clinical-level symptoms, and a therapeutic alliance participants rated comparable to human therapists. A waitlist comparator inflates effects relative to an active or attention control, follow-up was only eight weeks, outcomes were self-reported, and the safety of unsupervised generative AI in people with mental illness is not addressed in the abstract.