If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 9 8 8 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.Laura Reiley knew that her only daughter, 29-year-old Sophie Rottenberg, was struggling.It was the fall of 2024, and Rottenberg was at the end of a short career break."She was complaining of sleep disruption and anxiety," says Reiley, who lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband.Rottenberg had quit her job as a public health policy analyst in Washington D.C.
earlier that year, and spent the summer traveling.She had climbed Mt.
Kilimanjaro and hiked through several national parks in the United States.By the time she saw her parents, she was job hunting, which they assumed explained her anxiety.She had always been a "driven, success-oriented person," says Reiley, so "we thought OK this makes sense — she's having some sleeplessness, some anxiety about her future."But by Thanksgiving, her mental health had worsened.
"It was the first time she used the word depression," says Reiley.In early February 2025, Sophie Rottenberg died by suicide in Ithaca, leaving her parents shocked and grieving."She really had not revealed the magnitude of what was going on — the real depth of her agony to anyone — not to us, not to her best friend with whom she was very close," says Reiley."We were all just stunned that it hadn't bled out into her real life.
Her flesh and blood therapist had no idea that she was suicidal."What Reiley didn't know then was that her daughter had been sharing all her inner struggles with an artificial intelligence chatbot: a ChatGPT therapist named Harry.She learned this months later when her daughter's best friend visited Ithaca and asked to see her laptop, and "found this trove, this months-long trove of communication with this chat bot," says Reiley, who has shared the nearly 1,800-page long interaction with NPR.Rottenberg was among a growing number of Americans turning to general use chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude...