When students turn to AI for wellbeing support, universities must rediscover how to be human

For those attending this year’s party conferences, join HEPI for our 2026 Party Conference ringe events, at the Labour Party Conference on Monday 28 September in Liverpool and the Conservative Party Conference on Monday 5 October in Birmingham.

At both conferences, HEPI will host two events exploring some of the biggest issues facing higher education:

• Higher Education Question Time, bringing together sector leaders to answer your questions about the key challenges and opportunities for universities,
• Soft power in a hardening world: is the UK making the most of its global assets?, examining the UK’s international influence and the role of higher education within it.

All events take place outside the secure zones, so no conference pass is required. Register your interest now. As with all party conference fringe events, attendance is first come, first served and registering does not guarantee you will get a seat.

This blog was kindly authored by Dr Kieran Phelan, Assistant Professor in Human Geography, and School Senior Tutor at the University of Nottingham.

With the number of students with mental health conditions almost quadrupling over the last decade, the sector faces acute demand on its mental health support services. University mental health advisors report growing caseloads in both number and complexity, with over half considered ‘high risk’. Whilst student mental health remains a key institutional priority, efforts to improve capacity are often outpaced by demand, which is itself intensified by wider economic pressures. The cost of living crisis, housing insecurity, graduate labour market uncertainty and the challenge of balancing paid work alongside study compound existing risks associated with academic pressure, relocation and separation from established support networks.

We often imagine campus to be an enabler of good wellbeing – a place of rich social capital where community builds, friendships form and support is available to flourish and learn. However, increasingly, this imagination is outdated. Lecture halls are emptier,  seminars are quieter, in-person engagement is lower and students report growing social isolation. Far from our social imagination of campus life, for growing numbers of students, life is defined through loneliness.

Some attribute this to wider societal shifts, including declining civic engagement and the growth of social media culture. Others have reflected on how campus itself shapes student experience, and how, intentionally or otherwise, it has become more asocial. The proliferation of online learning and lecture recordings, anonymous mass teaching and the decline of social third spaces have all weakened opportunities for connection and friendship building. Increasingly, the social ‘work’ traditionally associated with campus life can no longer be assumed.

This should concern anyone committed to student wellbeing. Students are simultaneously experiencing rising mental health pressures and growing barriers to support, whilst university services struggle to meet and resource escalating demand. When institutional support proves difficult to access, perhaps due to long waiting times or constrained working schedules, student support-seeking behaviours don’t disappear but are displaced into digital spaces outside of university support structures; on social media, online communities and across the internet more broadly.

Increasingly, AI-powered conversational platforms- chatbots- are becoming part of this landscape. Whilst concerns about ChatGPT-written essays continue to dominate institutional AI discussions, students are engaging with AI in far more varied and complex ways. So-called ‘pastoral AI’ is growing. Whilst mainstream tools such as Copilot and ChatGPT are designed for productivity, users are increasingly turning to them for life advice, wellbeing, and emotional support. Recent research suggests that therapy and companionship may now represent among the most popular AI use cases. The HEPI/Kortext Student Generative AI Survey found that around 15% of students are using AI for companionship, advice or to address loneliness

For students already experiencing poor mental health, the risks are especially acute. Conversations can amplify mania, validate psychosis and encourage unhealthy dependence rather than resolution. In the most troubling cases, chatbots have generated dangerous responses and encouraged harmful behaviour. Whilst extreme, such cases are products of sycophantic systems optimised for engagement, unbounded by therapeutic ethics and devoid of pastorally guided human intervention.

Why students are turning to AI for mental health and wellbeing support tells us a great deal about the student support ecosystem and what’s not working. Seventeen per cent of young people value AI because it is ‘always available’. Twelve per cent say they use chatbots because they have no one else to talk to, rising substantially amongst vulnerable young people, whilst ten per cent claim they would rather turn to AI than an adult for advice or wellbeing support. It speaks to the social worlds our young people are navigating, as well as how our campus and support environments appear to be failing to build, invest in and articulate the value of trusted and accessible human support infrastructures.

AI is already showing up in support and wellbeing services; the ambiguity of institutional AI policies, the threat of academic misconduct and the more general existential threats of AI, are already being discussed in support conversations. But rarely do we take seriously, on an institutional level, how AI is already being used beyond assessment by our students, and especially as a risky support replacements for our overstretched support and wellbeing services. This shift is just not yet institutionally acknowledged.

But with the growing use of pastoral AI and its known associated risks, higher education institutions urgently need to begin a different kind of AI conversation. This will require different voices of expertise; not just learning technologists or digital pedagogists, but also counsellors, pastoral advisers, and mental health professionals.

Yet, unlike academic misconduct policy, where levers of change are largely procedural, re-defining and re-shaping university support cultures will be more challenging and will demand a more expansive scope of effort and responsibility beyond the purview of support and wellbeing services alone. It will involve us all.

Sure, it might require rethinking student’s user experiences of existing support and wellbeing services, and might also require greater human resources to deliver more in-person and accessible support. This will no doubt be challenging given the sector’s stretched finances. But it will also demand that institutions elevate pastoral provision as part of a bigger mission-critical agenda of building better, more enabling, human-centred educational experiences, where their students are intentionally supported to build more enriching social capital together. Put simply, to build a campus that’s unapologetically human.