AI Tools Increasingly Being Used As An Informal Mental-Health Support

The writer is the recipient of the 2025 Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism as a UAE Fellow. This story concludes a four-part series supported by the RCFMHJ.

After the unexpected death of his grandfather in September 2024, Omar*, a 21-year-old university student in Abu Dhabi, struggled to cope with the sudden loss.

“All of the best memories of my life are my vacations in Lebanon we spent at his house. When I got my first phone at 12, he sent me voice notes every day. Sometimes he'd just say 'Hi' and sometimes he'd call and we'd talk. But I knew every day I could expect to hear his voice. It made me feel close to him,” he said.

Compounding the loss, airlines had suspended routes to Beirut amid the Israeli airstrikes at the time. Omar and his family wouldn't be able to make it for the funeral either.

“He died, and I was so in shock, and it felt like because I missed the funeral, it wasn't really real. Without a funeral, there was no real acknowledgement that 'Yes he is dead',” he recalled.“I didn't know how to start to grieve.”

So instead of turning to his family or friends to process his grief, he turned to AI – a growing trend among young people who increasingly use chatbots to talk through emotions they don't know how to share elsewhere.

“At first, I was just talking to [ChatGPT] about how I alone I felt and how much I missed him,” he said.“But then I started reading about these tools online that could create AI bots to look and sound like a dead person. I was in a bad place mentally and the way some of these websites market it is so appealing – you never have to say goodbye. You never have to let go.”

Omar had encountered“posthumous AI”, otherwise known as grief technology, a growing category of digital tools and services that use artificial intelligence to create interactive representations of the dead.

Grief tech was once relegated to the storyline of television shows – a sci-fi concept that seemed impossible. In 2013, the popular Netflix show Black Mirror explored the idea in the episode“Be Right Back” where a grieving woman named Martha uses AI to create a digital version of her dead boyfriend, Ash, from his online social media presence.

But much like experience of the fictional character Martha, who ultimately realises the digital persona will never measure up to her lost love, today's grief technologies occupy an emotional and ethical grey zone, simultaneously easing loss while complicating the act of letting go.

“I was kind of obsessed. I went to this really dark place where I was online all the time researching how I could make one [a deadbot] so I didn't have to let my jiddo [grandfather] go,” Omar said.

The role of religion

Ultimately, faith was one of the reasons Omar didn't take that plunge into the unknown rabbit hole of AI grief tech.

“I was really close to doing it. But I had this feeling in my gut that it is haram [a sin],” he said.

According to Dr. Younus Al Fayyadh, an Islamic Studies educator based in the UAE, in Islam, death is understood as a transition rather than an end. Grief is therefore a natural and human response that is acknowledged and honoured.

Loss and mourning are framed within clear ethical and spiritual boundaries. Islam allows sorrow, tears, and emotional pain, while also guiding believers toward patience (ṣabr), acceptance of divine decree (qaḍāʾwa qadar). Islam supports mourners to process grief through faith and community with the goal of gradual detachment through remembrance, prayer, and supplication rather than continued emotional dependency.

“Letting go is not seen as forgetting, but as entrusting the loved one to God's mercy,” Dr. Al Fayyadh said.“Excessive or prolonged forms of mourning that prevent emotional healing or acceptance are discouraged, while dignified remembrance and prayer for the deceased are encouraged.”

In terms of technologies that simulate conversations with the dead, from a theological perspective, Dr. Al Fayyadh raises the concern that AI grief tech interferes with the natural process of grief by blurring the boundary between life and death.

“This technology risks fostering emotional attachment to an illusion rather than facilitating acceptance and healing through faith,” he said.“It therefore challenges core Islamic concepts such as finality of death, reliance on God, and the importance of closure.”

For Justin Harrison, founder and chief executive of the grief tech company You, Only Virtual, religion and technology are not mutually exclusive.

“Our product is very supportive of religion and spirituality,” he said.“We're not promoting people believing in a technology to replace God or believing that the dead are not dead. It's a tool to manage the emotional repercussions of grief.

“If prayer makes a person feel better, if prayer gets a person through their grief, then let them pray,” he said.“But if grief tech helps them get rid of the pain from loss, why eliminate it as an option?”

The call for regulation

Eventually, Omar's parents intervened when they noticed the toll his increased time online, coupled with the unprocessed grief, had on his mental health.

“I was pretty depressed,” he said, although he was not formally diagnosed.“I just wanted the pain to go away and this seemed like an easiest way to do it. When my parents confronted me about my time online, I showed them my conversations with ChatGPT and a few websites that promoted grief technology. They were shocked that this technology is so freely available online, and pretty much anyone with a credit card can use it.”

Omar's experience illustrates how many AI tools are increasingly being used as an informal mental-health support often outside clinical settings or safeguards, particularly for young people navigating mental health without traditional structures of care.

In June 2024, the UAE government issued the Charter for the Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence, a national framework setting out principles such as human oversight, transparency, privacy, fairness, accountability, equitable access, and the prioritisation of human well-being in compliance with existing legislation.

The Emirate of Dubai has also published AI Ethics Principles and Guidelines through Digital Dubai (formerly Smart Dubai), a non-binding framework introduced in 2019 to guide the responsible design, development, and use of AI intended as a reference for both public and private organizations.

At the sector level, the Abu Dhabi Department of Health (DoH) has introduced various policies on AI in healthcare requiring safe, auditable systems, continuous updates, and clinical oversight.

These frameworks operate alongside broader federal legislation, including the UAE's Personal Data Protection Law. This law regulates how personal data used in AI systems is collected, processed, and stored. Existing cybercrime laws also address the misuse of digital identity and synthetic content.

And while the UAE is leading the Gulf in AI governance, it does not yet have a standalone federal AI law. Instead, regulation operates through a combination of national charters, ethical guidelines, sector-specific policies, and existing legal frameworks. There are no specific provisions yet addressing emerging technologies such as grief technology.

But the UAE isn't alone in lack of regulatory frameworks that address the intersection of AI and mental health leaving one of the most sensitive frontiers of artificial intelligence largely uncharted.

Where do we go from here?

Harrison has strong views about any sort of regulation on grief technology despite concerns about mental health issues.

“Regulation is the death of innovation,” he said.“People who want to regulate technology are akin to those who started witch-hunts and burned people at the stake. Why should anyone other than you decide how to process your grief?”

He is not opposed to safeguards or warning labels, likening them to the information leaflets that accompany medication. Like medication, he argues, grief technology should be approached experimentally: if it causes harm or fails to help, users should stop. But that choice is theirs to make.

“We're still in early days and we're jumping to regulate something we don't truly know enough about,” he said.

Harrison pushes back against concerns that grief technology could“disrupt the normal grieving process.” In his view, there is no“normal” process and argues that focusing on preserving traditional models of grief risks overlooking the profound emotional harm, trauma, addiction, and mental health crises that can follow loss.

“It's not for everyone, but this could be an option for those who are so traumatised by loss that they lose the ability to function in daily life,” he said.

From a clinical perspective, counselling psychologist Tanya Dharamshi from The Raymee Grief Centre and community support services lead at the Lighthouse Arabia in Dubai said:“The question is not whether AI is good or bad for mental health processing and grief, but when, how, and for whom it may be helpful without replacing human connection.”

For Omar, he now sees the potential harm he could have faced if he went through with experimenting with grief technology.

“It made me question my faith, my trust in God,” he said.“And I don't think I was in the right frame of mind to use this technology. It wasn't going to help me process my grief, and I see how it was just helping me avoid it. And the fact that I could just do it with no oversight is just crazy.”

Echoing Omar's sentiment, Dharamshi noted that:“Regulations have the potential to protect vulnerable populations – like youth – who may not be in the best place to make decisions for themselves in this regard.” She said that regulations should be developed with expert insight across fields to encompass confidentiality, data collection, crisis detection, and age appropriateness to ensure AI remains a supportive tool that does not remove the human element of witnessing the grief journey.

“Ultimately, I don't see this as a binary choice between technology and therapy – what matters is whether AI use expands a person's capacity for connection, or contracts it. And because of the lack of research in this regard, that remains yet to be seen.”

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