[drakonka]

Anecdotally, not with depressive symptoms but anxiety, I find that use of ChatGPT/Claude for 'brainstorming' personal situations was definitely a gateway to further rumination for me. As someone who works on AI agents I thought I'd never fall into that trap and knew how to use it 'properly' when I wanted a sounding board. I was wrong. I now avoid general-use chatbots for personal issues as much as I can because it feels like it's helping in the short term, but has always been worse in aggregate.

(I say general-use because I think there are some AI-based tools that are specially made which _can_ actually be helpful for this - but opening a ChatGPT tab, even with lots of relevant instructions, ain't it in my experience. The interface itself is counter-productive to healthy processing.)