Making mental health chatbots more culturally sensitive won’t necessarily make them safer

The people most likely to depend on chatbots for support are the ones least likely to be culturally understood by them: newcomers, people in rural and remote communities, and anyone who cannot afford private therapy. (Unsplash+/Adam Satrai) Making mental health chatbots more culturally sensitive won’t necessarily make them safer Published: September 21, 2026 12.13pm EDT Share article Print article Demand for mental health care in Canada has risen sharply. In a health-care system already short of publicly funded specialists, Canadians often wait months for support. Many are filling this gap with general-purpose generative AI chatbots (like ChatGPT), presumably because these systems are free, immediate and available at all hours. However, these chatbots carry assumptions about what distress is and how it should be described, and those assumptions may not fit everyone. In 2024–25, there were roughly 94,000 referrals for community mental health counselling across the provinces and territories that report this data. Half of those people were seen within 30 days. One in 10 waited more than four months. A 2026 survey of more than 1,200 licensed psychologists in the United States found that 77 per cent had patients who told them they were using AI for mental health support, and more than one-third had patients who considered their chatbot an additional provider. These tools have not been approved by Health Canada, and no Canadian regulation governs them as therapy. The data also suggest that the people most likely to depend on chatbots for support are the ones least likely to be culturally understood by them: newcomers, people in rural and remote communities and anyone who cannot afford private therapy. A chatbot’s response to someone in distress is rooted in a cultural stance. (Unsplash+/Vladimir Fedotov) Chatbots are not culturally neutral When a chatbot responds to someone in distress, it’s already committed to a view of what distress is and what helps. Its default assumes distress sits inside the individual, is made of thoughts and feelings, and improves when those thoughts are examined and changed. That is a recognizable clinical tradition (broadly western and cognitive-behavioural), when an individualistic concept of the person has long been identified as culturally particular rather than universal. In general-purpose AI chatbots, this surfaces as a tendency toward the values of English-speaking populations in the Global North. As a PhD…