Why I Think the Shift Is Coming Anyway

The change is here. Whether we are ready or not.

The math does not work

About 1 in every 8 people in the world has a mental health condition (Shoshani et al., 2026). That is more than a billion people.

Of those people, only about 1 in every 4 gets care. Three out of every four go without.

There are not enough therapists. There never will be. Even if every country trained ten times more therapists starting tomorrow, the gap would still be there in twenty years.

That is the math. And the math is why I think this change is coming whether anyone wants it or not.

People are nervous, and that is fair

Lots of people are uneasy about using AI for feelings. I am too, sometimes. The nervousness makes sense.

It feels strange to talk about the deepest parts of yourself with a machine. It feels strange to think a tool could feel warm. It feels strange to imagine your own kid, twenty years from now, telling you that the first thing they did when they felt sad was open an app.

These feelings are not silly. They are signals. They are telling us to be careful, to think hard, to ask good questions.

But here is what is also happening. Quietly, in many homes, people are already turning to AI when they feel low. The change is not waiting for our permission. The study I read is one of the first careful looks at whether it actually helps. There will be more.

Where journaling fits in

Writing about your feelings is one of the oldest tools we have. People have kept journals for thousands of years. Modern science has studied this for decades. The research is clear. Putting feelings into words helps people feel better, think more clearly, and make better choices.

What is new is that the writing can now be a conversation. You write something. Something writes back. Not with a real mind on the other side, but with patterns shaped by careful design.

This is the part of the change I work on. At Hurroz, we built Sol, a reflective AI that helps people think through what they wrote. Sol is not a therapist. Sol does not pretend to be human. Sol is a careful tool meant to help you reflect, the way a wise friend who listens well might help you reflect.

I built Sol because of what this study and others like it suggest. People who write about their feelings often, with something that responds thoughtfully, do feel better. That is real. The careful question is how to do it well.

The honest close

I want to be careful here at the end.

This is one study. Of 995 young, educated people. With mild to moderate stress. Not severe illness. Not all walks of life. The findings might be different in different places, with different people, over longer time.

If you are reading this and any of it touches a place that is hurting in you, please remember. This is not therapy advice. It is one person reading one study. If you are feeling the kind of low that does not lift, or the kind of fear that does not pass, or the kind of pain that lasts a long time, the right people to help with that are mental health professionals. They have training that no app and no article can replace.

What I take from the study is something smaller, and I hope, more honest. Something is changing in how people get support for their feelings. The change is not all good. The change is not all bad. The change is happening.

The work, for those of us who build tools in this space, is to take it seriously. To watch our biases. To listen to the people who are nervous. And to build the carefully, knowing that the easier path is to build them carelessly and let the hype do the rest.

That is what I am thinking about. That is the work.

References

Shoshani, A., Gurfinkel, B., Kor, A., et al. (2026). Efficacy of a Conversational AI Agent for Psychiatric Symptoms and Digital Therapeutic Alliance: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Network Open, 9(4), e266713.