Finding Help

Your GP or family doctor is the least dramatic way into the healthcare system. You don’t need a diagnosis or a rehearsed story to start there. One appointment and a few sentences about sleep, concentration, mood, and how much space conversations with a chatbot are taking up right now — that’s enough of an opening.

It’s also the place to check whether anything physical is playing a part, and where you can be pointed onwards if you need it. Nobody laughing at you for this topic is the norm by now: professionals are encountering it more and more often.

How you reach therapy depends on where you live. In many countries the route runs through your doctor, who can refer you; in the UK you can also refer yourself directly to NHS talking therapies without going through anyone. If you have health insurance, its directory of providers is usually the fastest list; if you’re employed, an employee assistance programme often covers a first few sessions confidentially. National professional associations keep searchable registers of accredited therapists, including those offering online sessions.

Expect to contact several practices — that is unfortunately normal and says nothing about you. The first appointment is usually about assessing together whether treatment makes sense, followed by a few initial sessions in which both sides see whether it fits. If it doesn’t fit, you’re allowed to change. That is explicitly part of the process.

One thing that matters for this topic in particular: you can talk openly about your AI use there. Professional bodies published their own guidance on this in 2025 and 2026, and the explicit request is that chatbot use be disclosed in a treatment context. So it isn’t an embarrassing footnote — it’s relevant information, especially if you’ve been using the bot as your conversation partner for heavy subjects.

If you’re thinking about suicide, want to hurt yourself, or feel like you’re losing the ground beneath you: talk to a human being now, not to a chatbot.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans are reachable around the clock, free and confidential, on 116 123. In the US, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline answers calls and texts to 988, also 24/7 and free.

Anywhere else, findahelpline.com will find the right crisis line for your country in a few seconds — the site detects your location automatically and lists free services.

If there is immediate danger to you or to someone else, call the emergency services — 999 or 112 in the UK and Ireland, 911 in the US. That is not an overreaction; it is exactly what they are there for.

If you’re worried about someone else, you’re allowed to get support too — and you don’t have to wait until the person concerned is ready. Local counselling services, family and parenting support organisations, carer support groups, and addiction services (which have long covered problematic media use) are all places you can approach in your own right. Counselling is usually free or low-cost, confidential, and anonymous if you prefer.

What you get there are two things that are hard to come by at home: an assessment from outside, and concrete wording for the next conversation. How to have that conversation without it turning into a row is covered in the chapter “When you’re worried about someone”.

Between “alone with it” and “in therapy” lies a large space that peer support covers well. Local self-help networks can point you to groups on media use, and online there are now peer spaces specifically for people whose AI use has got out of balance — and for the people around them.

The bejiji community at bejiji.com/community is one of those places too: a moderated space where people write openly about their results, their patterns and their setbacks. A forum is no substitute for treatment, but it takes the uniqueness out of a topic — and for many people, reading that someone else is describing the same thing is what makes the first real step possible.

Professionals can help you faster if they have a few concrete anchors. Useful ones are: a rough estimate of your usage times (your device’s screen-time figure is perfectly sufficient), the typical triggers — boredom, loneliness, anxiety, work, not being able to sleep — what has changed since it started (sleep, concentration, contacts, mood), and what you’ve already tried yourself.

You don’t need to bring chat histories or screenshots. It is completely fine to summarise, or to leave out anything personal — this is about your pattern, not about evidence. And if all that preparation feels like too much: the first sentence is enough, and the rest follows from the conversation.