A new Stanford-led study published two days ago estimates that between 13 and 17 million American adults may already be using artificial intelligence for mental-health support. They are doing so because professional help is too expensive, insurance coverage is inadequate, waiting lists are intolerable and the healthcare system has made human support inaccessible to those without sufficient money. AI is not simply attracting patients away from therapists; it is filling the void created by a system that has placed a price on psychological suffering and decided that those who cannot pay must endure it alone. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-026-02842-9
The depth of this social fury became impossible to ignore after the young engineer Luigi Mangione killed a health-insurance CEO. A national poll found that 17% of American voters regarded the killing as acceptable. Among those aged 18 to 29, however, that figure surged to 41%. This is not merely evidence of declining moral restraint. It is an indictment of a healthcare system that has spent decades denying treatment, bankrupting families, humiliating the sick and converting human suffering into corporate profit. When millions of young Americans can no longer condemn without hesitation the killing of one of that system’s most powerful representatives, the responsibility does not lie only with individual rage. It also lies with an industry that has accumulated so much cruelty, resentment and despair that violence itself has begun to appear, to a disturbing share of a generation, as an intelligible response.
PS - This abandonment is not confined to mental healthcare. As I noted in a previous post, titled "Nobel Laureate Stiglitz: Why U.S. Healthcare is Failing Its Citizens" an analysis of nine million cancer cases found that 38% of patients had gone bankrupt within four years. https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2020/01/nobel-stiglitz-sick-and-desperate.html
