A scoping review on the mental health harms of LLM-based chatbots
Alexander Diel; John Blake Torous; Pim J. Cuijpers; Jens Kleesiek; Felix Nensa; Niels Weber; Franziska Faust; Tania Josan Lalgi · 2026 · npj Digital Medicine
WASTE classifies this as Negative / Null Result Report · AI classification, approximate
The study found no significant effect — useful as a negative control or null benchmark for your own design.
Abstract
Chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in everyday life. Although concerns about negative impacts on mental health are raised, a synthesis of the research and themes of the growing field of potential mental health harms of LLM-based chatbots has not yet been conducted. For the present scoping review, a PRISMA-based systematic literature search with a validated search string was conducted, identifying N = 3137 articles from five literature databases (ACM, IEEE, PubMed, Science.gov, Google Scholar) and a supplementary search. N = 119 articles were included that (1)
Abstract by Alexander Diel; John Blake Torous; Pim J. Cuijpers; Jens Kleesiek; Felix Nensa; Niels Weber; Franziska Faust; Tania Josan Lalgi, npj Digital Medicine (2026) — licensed CC BY 4.0.
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Metadata source: OpenAlex · DOI 10.1038/s41746-026-03054-x