Part 1 laid out what the study found. Part 2 was for the person living with a mental health challenge.
This one is for the rest of us. The people standing around them.
If you love someone who lives with a mental health challenge
Start with yourself. Model it.
If your own face is in your phone all evening, nothing you say about theirs will land. Let them watch you call a friend. Let them watch you leave the house to go be with people. Show them what being in a relationship with other people looks like, instead of being in a relationship with a screen.
Then do not take their phone away. You will lose the conversation.
Ask a better question instead: “Who have you talked to this week?”
Someone reaching for a chatbot is lonely, not foolish.
And then do the simplest thing of all. Take them with you.
Take them for a walk. Take them along to coffee with your friends. Take them to church, or to the hardware store, or wherever you were already going.
Put the two of you somewhere other people are, where a conversation will happen on its own.
You are not trying to fix them. You are handing them a real person to talk to. That is the one thing their phone cannot hand them.
If you are a pastor or a church leader
Some of the people in your pews are getting their counsel from AI this week.
Not because you failed them. Because AI is free, and AI is awake at three in the morning.
So talk about it. Out loud. From the pulpit, from your teaching podium, and in your small groups.
AI is here. AI is not going away. And you cannot stick your head in the sand about it.
Your people are already using AI every day. If the church says nothing about AI, your people will assume the church has nothing to say about it — and they will keep sorting it out alone, with a machine.
You will never beat AI on availability. Do not try.
Beat AI on the one thing AI cannot do. Remember your people. Notice your people. Show up for your people.
One last thing
Hope is a choice. But hope is a choice we make together with other people.
That has always been true. The machines did not change it. They just made it easier to forget.
If your church does not have a place where people can be honest on a Tuesday night, something is going to fill that hole. Something already is.
