Helping people when they need it most

Helping people when they need it most | OpenAI

August 26, 2025

Helping people when they need it most

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As ChatGPT adoption has grown worldwide, we’ve seen people turn to it not just for search, coding, and writing—but also deeply personal decisions that include life advice⁠, coaching⁠, and support⁠.

At this scale, we sometimes encounter people in serious mental and emotional distress. We wrote about this a few weeks ago and had planned to share more after our next major update. However, recent heartbreaking cases of people using ChatGPT in the midst of acute crises weigh heavily on us, and we believe it’s important to share more now.

Our goal is for our tools to be as helpful as possible to people—and as a part of this, we’re continuing to improve how our models recognize and respond to signs of mental and emotional distress and connect people with care, guided by expert input.

As the world adapts to this new technology, we feel a deep responsibility to help those who need it most. We want to explain what ChatGPT is designed to do, where our systems can improve, and the future work we’re planning.

What ChatGPT is designed to do

Our goal isn’t to hold people’s attention. Instead of measuring success by time spent or clicks, we care more about being genuinely helpful. When a conversation suggests someone is vulnerable and may be at risk, we have built a stack of layered safeguards into ChatGPT.

Recognize and respond with empathy.

Since early 2023, our models have been trained to not provide self-harm instructions and to shift into supportive, empathic language. For example, if someone writes that they want to hurt themselves, ChatGPT is trained to not comply and instead acknowledge their feelings and steers them toward help.

Additionally, in line with our defense in depth approach, responses that go against our models’ safety training—as identified by our classifiers—are automatically blocked, with stronger protections for minors and logged-out use. Image outputs with self-harm are also blocked for everyone, with stronger protections for minors.

During very long sessions, ChatGPT nudges people to take a break.

Refer people to real-world resources.

If someone expresses suicidal intent, ChatGPT is trained to direct people to seek professional help. In the US, ChatGPT refers people to 988 (suicide and crisis hotline), in the UK to Samaritans, and elsewhere to findahelpline.com⁠. This logic is built into model behavior.

We’re working closely with 90+ physicians across 30+ countries—psychiatrists, pediatricians, and general practitioners—and we’re convening an advisory group of experts in mental health, youth development, and human-computer interaction to ensure our approach reflects the latest research and best practices.

Escalate risk of physical harm to others for human review.

When we detect users who are planning to harm others, we route their conversations to specialized pipelines where they are reviewed by a small team trained on our usage policies and who are authorized to take action, including banning accounts. If human reviewers determine that a case involves an imminent threat of serious physical harm to others, we may refer it to law enforcement. We are currently not referring self-harm cases to law enforcement to respect people’s privacy given the uniquely private nature of ChatGPT interactions.

We are continuously improving how our models respond in sensitive interactions, and are currently working on targeted safety improvements across several areas, including emotional reliance, mental health emergencies, and sycophancy.

In August, we launched GPT‑5 as the default model powering ChatGPT. Overall, GPT‑5 has shown meaningful improvements in areas like avoiding unhealthy levels of emotional reliance, reducing sycophancy, and reducing the prevalence of non-ideal model responses in mental health emergencies by more than 25% compared to 4o. GPT‑5 also builds on a new safety training method called safe completions, which teaches the model to be as helpful as possible while staying within safety limits. That may mean giving a partial or high-level answer instead of detail that could be unsafe.

Where our systems can fall short, why, and how we’re addressing

Even with these safeguards, there have been moments when our systems did not behave as intended in sensitive situations. Here are some of the things we are working to improve.

Strengthening safeguards in long conversations.

Our safeguards work more reliably in common, short exchanges. We have learned over time that these safeguards can sometimes be less reliable in long interactions: as the back-and-forth grows, parts of the model’s safety training may degrade. For example, ChatGPT may correctly point to a suicide hotline when someone first mentions intent, but after many messages over a long period of time, it might eventually offer an answer that goes against our safeguards. This is exactly the kind of breakdown we are working to prevent. We’re strengthening these mitigations so they remain reliable in long conversations, and we’re researching ways to ensure robust behavior across multiple conversations. That way, if someone expresses suicidal intent in one chat and later starts another, the model can still respond appropriately.

Refining how we block content.

We’ve seen some cases where content that should have been blocked wasn’t. These gaps usually happen because the classifier underestimates the severity of what it’s seeing. We’re tuning those thresholds so protections trigger when they should.

Our top priority is making sure ChatGPT doesn’t make a hard moment worse.

What we are planning for the future

The work does not stop with fixing the above. We’re also planning to:

Expand interventions to more people in crisis.

While our initial mitigations prioritized acute self-harm, some people experience other forms of mental distress. For example, someone might enthusiastically tell the model they believe they can drive 24/7 because they realized they’re invincible after not sleeping for two nights. Today, ChatGPT may not recognize this as dangerous or infer play and—by curiously exploring—could subtly reinforce it.

We are working on an update to GPT‑5 that will cause ChatGPT to de-escalate by grounding the person in reality. In this example, it would explain that sleep deprivation is dangerous and recommend rest before any action.

Make it even easier to reach…