A New Mental Health Crisis Is Happening Right Now

 

A New Mental Health Crisis Is Happening Right Now

A New Mental Health One of my childhood friends, Jake, works customer support for a mid-sized tech company. Remote job. Good benefits. Started just after graduation, planning to stay long enough to get experience.

That was five years ago.

Now Jake logs on at eight, answers tickets all day, jumps between Slack channels, and stays late whenever a product update breaks something it shouldn’t. He says most of the messages aren’t really about bugs anymore. They’re about panic. People typing paragraphs at a time. Apologizing for bothering him. Asking if he’s sure they didn’t do something wrong.

Jake told me about his screen time report. He spends ten hours a day in front of a laptop and wonders why he feels exhausted. When I asked how he was holding up, he laughed and said he’d been “talking it through” with an AI chatbot most nights. Just to vent and organize his thoughts.

“ChatGPT helps me calm down,” he said. “It doesn’t judge. And it’s always there.”

Last month, Jake messaged me after midnight and told me he pasted a long conversation into the chat. The bot had walked him through his anxiety step by step. Asked follow-up questions…