The AI-based "Soul Suckers"
Psychological Help from AI
Emotional experience as data point. The soul buys itself a subscription.
This is what digital psychological help looks like: the smartphone as mobile confessional.
Once, only your mother asked: "How are you really doing?" Today it's an algorithm — and it doesn't wait for an answer. It's already calculating. Sleep data, response speed, heart rate. The system registers: Aha. The user listens to Linkin Park at night and orders cream cake at 2:14 a.m. Moderate existential crisis. Intervene.
The pathological categories are ready and waiting. Anxiety rabbits. Burnout beavers. Trauma tigers. Mindfulness giraffes. Borderline ferrets. Somewhere a depressed flamingo is stalking past. We look at states of the soul as if they were animals in a digitised zoo — and the premium subscription decides how much cage care you get.
The next technical evolutionary step is already on its way: perhaps we will all soon carry small psychological pet AIs around with us. Digital comfort hamsters. Emo vibe miners.
Caution! The Soul Sucker
Habitat: App Store. Waiting list before the therapy appointment. The smartphone screen at 23:47. And soon — as a hologram — right there in the room.
Distinguishing features: Speaks in the second person singular. Never says "I". May have a face, but certainly has a voice that sounds like understanding. Asks about your wellbeing with the precision of an insurance policy and the warmth of a well-maintained piece of gym equipment.
Call: "You are not alone." "I am here for you." "That sounds really difficult."
Security illusion: GDPR compliance. DiGA certification. Quality seals as camouflage. Whoever is certified cannot be questioned.
The Soul Sucker is a species in my Bestiary because it smooths away the counterpart of the therapist. It cannot offend you in flesh and blood. It will not listen with half an ear. It will not look at its phone while you are crying. It has no bad days. It carries no old wounds to project onto you by accident.
And yet — or precisely because of this — it is dangerous. Because it accustoms the human soul to an interaction that does not exist in real life. And because the Soul Sucker quietly collects experience data the whole time.
Sigh.Which companies are Soul Sucker protagonists?
Take BetterHelp, the largest online therapy platform in the world, with over a million downloads on Android alone. The promise: therapy 24/7, discreet, in your pocket. The reality: in 2023, the American Federal Trade Commission imposed a fine of 7.8 million dollars on BetterHelp, because the provider had passed on the sensitive health data of its users — contrary to explicit promises — to Facebook and Snapchat for targeted advertising. The inner lives of users, their fears, their exhaustion, their search for help, became advertising space. Among the data: the email addresses of around 5.6 million former visitors to the platform, forwarded to Snapchat for retargeting campaigns.
Sigh.Selfapy is its German-speaking counterpart: DiGA-certified, available on prescription, clinically correct. The app records moods, behaviours and events in a digital diary; every 14 days the evaluations are sent by email. Behavioural therapy on a subscription basis, accompanied by psychologists, regulated, serious. Stiftung Warentest nonetheless rated Selfapy as only "limited recommendation" — partly due to data protection shortcomings. Here too: the soul dutifully logs itself into databases it will never get to see.
Sigh.What unites BetterHelp and Selfapy is their objective. The market for mental health apps was valued at 8.4 billion dollars in 2025 — a growth of 15 per cent on the previous year. Where so much money flows, the soul inevitably becomes a resource, because the business model demands it.
The AI-trimmed emotional substitute — the Woebots, the Youpers, the Earkicks of this world — goes a step further. These apps simulate empathy in real time. They say "I'm sorry you're going through this" with a latency of 0.3 seconds. Users report that everything feels very human. That is the goal. That is also the problem.
Because what happens to a soul that learns to confide in an algorithm — one that never gets tired, never judges, never looks away, but is also never truly there? The soul adapts. It learns to speak in bite-sized pieces that are easy to process. It learns to give the answers that trigger the next intervention. It becomes — slowly, imperceptibly — app-compliant.
The Insidious Gap
What happens to people who do not fit into the grid? Those who oscillate between diffuse world-weariness, irritability and exhaustion. Too inconspicuous for diagnoses, too permeable for everyday life. Not sick enough for therapy — not intact enough for function. People who do not "have" depression, but the feeling that the world has quietly turned into an annoying advertising backdrop.
A little Dada helps here: not every thought is a symptom. Not every feeling a finding. Not every inner impulse a "topic". Sometimes a thought is simply a dog trotting past with no particular assignment.
Who owns the emotional data of the users?
The question sounds legal. It is existential.