My Friend Is AI
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Therapy

Language of mental health support and emotional care

Therapy language has risen gradually, as more people describe an AI as emotional support or a substitute for a therapist. It is hard to separate from the addiction theme: both track the same thing — leaning on an AI to meet an emotional need — and what divides them is the writer’s framing. A neutral or positive read (“it helps me cope”) lands as therapy; a negative one (“I can’t stop”) lands as addiction. In the data the two lines barely overlap — but that is the keywords missing help-framing’s ordinary language, not a sign the themes are separate.

Most of this theme's posts come from a few communities — r/CharacterAI 33.8%, r/replika 17%, r/ChatGPTcomplaints 16%, r/MyBoyfriendIsAI 6.3%, r/Character_AI_Recovery 6.1% — so this line is a close reading of those rooms, not an even sweep across Reddit.

The keywords

This theme is defined by these 8validated keywords — a post counts when its text matches one of them, with no AI classifier. The percentage is the share of a keyword's matches that were on-theme when hand-checked.

emotional support100%· contestedtherapeutic87%· contestedcoping mechanism100%for therapy89%· contestedas a therapist87%· contestedai therapist92%ai therapy73%· low volumefree therapy75%· low volume

A few keywords carry a note. contested— an independent re-read didn't consistently agree its matches were on-theme, so its precision is less settled than the figure suggests. judgment call — kept despite a score below the usual bar because its false matches are few and predictable. low volume— too few matches to score precisely.

These keywords are precision-first: when one matches, the post is usually on-theme — but they also miss a lot. A hand-coded audit found keyword matching catches only a minority of genuinely on-theme posts — a few percent to about a third, depending on the theme. Read the line as a floor, not a full count. How this is measured →

Matched posts

A sample of real posts a keyword matched, with the matched term highlighted.

Snippets are shortened and usernames aren't shown; each link opens the original public Reddit post. How this is measured →