Summary: The GUARD Act would require age verification for AI chatbots and ban minors from using companion chatbots. Evidence that these restrictions would reduce youth suicide is limited, while AI tools may provide mental health support for some users who lack other options. The proposal could restrict privacy, speech, and innovation. More targeted policies may offer a better way to protect vulnerable users.

The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced Senator Josh Hawley’s Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act. The bill would require every American to verify their age before using a generative AI chatbot and would bar anyone under eighteen from using a “companion” chatbot at all. In the room during the markup were the parents of children who died by suicide after conversations with AI products. Their grief is unimaginable, and their motives are beyond reproach. But concerningly, such a policy might quietly cost rather than save lives.

The strongest claim animating this bill is the belief that restricting minors’ access to AI chatbots will prevent suicide. On the available evidence, that claim is closer to a hypothesis than a finding—and a hypothesis that runs against several decades of data on how young people die. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American suicide rate began climbing around the year 2000—before ChatGPT, smartphones, or social media even existed. It accelerated through the 2010s, then, contrary to popular narrative, plateaued and modestly declined after 2018—even as generative AI moved from research labs into the pockets of nearly every teenager in the country. If chatbots were a meaningful driver of adolescent suicide, the curves should have moved together. They have not, and, importantly, suicide rates among young Americans remain the lowest among any age group. 

While any loss of a young life to suicide is a tragedy, whatever is killing young Americans predates the technology that lawmakers now propose to ban them from using. 

What the GUARD Act’s sponsors do not seriously consider is the other side of the ledger. There are cases where AI could help Americans of all ages when it comes to mental health. Roughly half of Americans with a diagnosable mental health condition never seek professional help; stigma, cost, and fear of involuntary intervention keep them silent. For some of them—especially adolescents in households where therapy is unaffordable, unavailable, or unsafe to disclose—a chatbot is their most reliable form of emotional support. 

In a survey of over 1,000 adolescents and young adults, 13 percent had used a chatbot for mental health support, and more than 90 percent of those found it helpful. In another study of over 1,000 users of Replika, a popular AI chatbot, 30 reported without solicitation that their artificial companion saved them from suicide. 

We do not know how many lives generative AI has saved by improving access to mental health care. But for every incidence of AI psychosis or suicide, there may be dozens of unobserved positive outcomes. Policy that presumes only the worst outcomes also prevents the best.

The consequences of the proposal could also dissuade investment or chill speech that would make better options available. Faced with $100,000 per-violation penalties, providers will not invest in better suicide-detection models and instead likely remove any content that could be related to such a topic, thus limiting resources to crisis hotlines for those who are struggling. It would also limit the availability of information for those seeking to understand a deeply traumatic event or help a friend who may be struggling. Clinicians have known for decades that abrupt treatment referrals without first building rapport can deepen shame and shut down disclosure. The best science suggests suicide-prevention frameworks place trust-building before resource provision precisely because the order matters. A regulatory regime that punishes providers for nuance will produce less of it.

Beyond being bad policy, such laws are almost certainly unconstitutional. The underlying policy is not based on a compelling government interest nor is it narrowly tailored. It impacts the speech rights and anonymity of all users of online tools, not just minors, on the basis of justifications that are far from accepted. The compliance regime is broad enough to capture homework helpers, customer-service chatbots, and search engines that produce conversational responses, placing a “papers, please” approach to a broad and growing swath of the internet. To enforce it, every American adult would have to upload a government ID or submit to biometric scanning to ask a question, complete a customer service interaction, or practice a foreign language.

More measured and better policy responses are available if policymakers want to support parents and teens who may encounter difficulties with AI chatbots or generative AI. That includes training and providing appropriate resources for law enforcement to go after the bad actors who abuse technology to create or solicit sexual content from minors. Investment in AI literacy, of the kind Idaho recently codified into its public schools, equips young people to use these tools the way they will inevitably need to use them as adults and can include information on what to do if they encounter problems. 

Far from being a problem, liability shields modeled on Section 230, paired with safe-harbor incentives for providers that invest in better mental-health detection, would reward the kind of careful development the current bill punishes. None of those would deliver the cathartic clarity of a ban, but all of them are more likely to save lives. Importantly, they also empower parents and other trusted adults, not policymakers, to be the ones who determine what makes sense when it comes to kids and teens’ AI use.

The bill’s sponsors are not acting in bad faith. The cases motivating them are real, and the impulse to protect the vulnerable is one of the more honorable features of our political instincts. But the pattern is familiar from earlier moral panics over comic books, rock music, and video games. Each was sincerely felt. Each rested on weak social science amplified by strong public emotion. Each produced a policy that aged poorly.

The GUARD Act asks us to trade a measurable loss of liberty and privacy for an unmeasured, and possibly negative, impact on safety. The forces that drive people toward suicide—isolation, family conflict, untreated illness, loss of meaning—operate on timescales and through mechanisms that no technology policy will address. To pretend otherwise is to offer grieving families a consolation that policy cannot honestly deliver while quietly closing a door through which other young people, less visible to us, are still walking toward help.

This article was originally published at Cato at Liberty on 5/5/2026.

“For decades, diseases like trachoma, and lymphatic filariasis burdened the people of Lao PDR. One by one, thanks to determined national efforts and robust international support, these burdens have been lifted. Trachoma in 2017, and lymphatic filariasis in 2023. Malaria cases fell to 272 in 2025. Now, we are taking on schistosomiasis.

A parasitic disease spread by freshwater snails, schistosomiasis has long posed a significant public health risk in Lao PDR, particularly in communities along the Mekoang River where infection rates in the 2003 exceeded 40% in some areas. The parasite’s microscopic larvae thrive in the very water that sustains daily life – for washing, fishing, and transport. The disease can cause debilitating symptoms like an enlarged liver, bleeding when going to the toilet, and even severe liver damage – with potentially fatal complications.

Efforts over the decades mean schistosomiasis is now found only in southern Champasack Province, with 120 000 people estimated to be at-risk across 202 villages. While sustained efforts have significantly reduced infection rates (less than 1% in high-risk areas), thousands are still affected, especially children”

From World Health Organization.

Summary: Growing concern over smartphones and social media has fueled claims that screens are driving an epidemic of adolescent mental illness. But the scientific evidence for this narrative remains mixed and often overstated, with many studies failing to distinguish correlation from causation or account for underlying social and psychological factors. Loneliness, family instability, social support and resilience appear to be far stronger predictors of youth well-being than screen time alone.

As a member of Gen Z, I have studied the effects of social media on adolescent mental health from a perspective most psychology researchers lack: I grew up under its influence.

Between ages 12 and 17, I was obese, socially isolated and addicted to the fantasy video game RuneScape. I was home-schooled, lived with just my mother and rarely went outside. I logged over 10,000 hours in that game alone, nearly a third of my waking life during those years.

That doesn’t include countless additional hours I spent on other video games, television and, of course, social media. I made friends through online chatrooms and pen pal websites because I had none in real life. I averaged well over 10 hours a day on devices.

If ever there were a case study for the claim that screens destroy young minds, I would seem to fit it. And yet here I am as a 26-year-old developmental psychologist with a doctorate from Harvard. I am in good mental and physical health, with deep friendships online and off.

Maybe I’m the exception. Or maybe the harms are overblown.

Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling book “The Anxious Generation” argues that smartphones and social media have “rewired” childhood and caused an epidemic of mental illness. The book has helped inspire social media restrictions in Australia and several American states, and shaped how a generation of parents thinks about technology.

Restricting screen time and social media access are reasonable aspirations for child-rearing. But as a matter of public policy, the case for regulation rests on a scientific foundation far weaker than its proponents claim.

Haidt’s argument relies on the observation that adolescent mental health indicators worsened around 2010, when smartphones and social media apps popular with young people — such as Instagram and Snapchat — started becoming widespread. But correlation is not causation, and research suggests that some of the supposed mental health crisis is an epidemic of overdiagnosis. Wealthy Western democracies with the highest smartphone adoption rates have also seen expanded access to psychiatric services and a cultural shift toward identifying and labeling psychological distress, as Abigail Shrier argues in her 2024 book “Bad Therapy.”

Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.

Many studies have reported on how social media use is associated with mental health problems among the young. However, a 2024 analysis in JAMA Pediatricsof 143 studies featuring data from over 1 million adolescents worldwide found that links between social media use and poor mental health among youth were small, inconsistent across studies and drawn mostly from nonclinical community samples.

One reason studies report mixed findings is that many fail to account for factors such as personality traits and social support that independently predict heavy screen use and mental distress. For example, social media use may be associated with anxiety and loneliness, not because it causes them, but because socially anxious individuals are more likely to seek out connections online. Statistically controlling for such factors often accounts for the relationship between social media and mental health.

I am not dismissing the possibility that some children are harmed by some content in some contexts. Many in my generation have had online exposure to graphic, violent and sexual imagery that no child should encounter.But the blanket claim that social media use drives generational mental illness does not align with the evidence.

Screens didn’t cause my problems. They were coping mechanisms for preexisting problems: loneliness, family instability, social anxiety, an absent father. The variables that predict youth mental health are not hours spent on social media but social support, resilience and a sense of belonging. To help struggling adolescents, the evidence points toward strengthening those capacities, not confiscating phones.

During my most isolated years, online connections were the only positive relationships I had. Internet forums helped me navigate college applications and taught me about calorie-counting, which sparked a weight-loss journey that changed my life. Even in RuneScape, I built discipline and goal-setting habits that I later transferred to academics and research.

Concerns about social media are well-intentioned. But sincerity is not proof. The dramatic assertions that children’s lives would be transformed by reducing social media exposure are more akin to moral panics over past technologies and obsessions — from radio to comic books to video games — fueled by weak social science and strong public emotion. In the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, youth mental health has been improving recently, despite no change in access to social media. The simplest explanation might be that social media is not as harmful as people think.

This article was originally published at the Washington Post on 4/12/2026.

“Gilead Sciences said on Friday [5/22/26] that its experimental drug for a rare and deadly ​liver infection that had no approved treatment has won U.S. approval.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug, Hepcludex, to treat chronic hepatitis delta virus, or HDV, a liver ​disease that affects only people already infected with hepatitis B and ​can lead to scarring, cancer, organ failure and death…

The approval was based on a late-stage trial, in which ​about 48% of patients who received the treatment showed a meaningful improvement after 48 weeks, ‌compared ⁠with 2% of those whose treatment was delayed. The virus became undetectable in patients the longer they remained on Hepcludex, the trial showed.”

From Reuters.