Author: Dr. Abhishek Mukherjee
DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.70798/Bijmrd/04061005
Abstract: Artificial intelligence is increasingly being discussed as a tool for strengthening school-based mental health programs. Schools are often the first institutional setting where emotional distress, anxiety, depression, social withdrawal, bullying-related trauma, learning stress, and behavioral changes become visible. However, many schools face shortages of trained counselors, limited referral systems, stigma around help-seeking, and difficulty providing continuous support outside school hours. AI-enabled tools such as mental health chatbots, early-warning analytics, adaptive screening systems, digital triage platforms, sentiment analysis, and personalized psychoeducational applications offer new opportunities to identify risk, provide low-intensity support, improve access, and assist teachers and counselors. At the same time, the use of AI with children and adolescents raises serious ethical and practical concerns, including privacy, consent, bias, algorithmic opacity, over-reliance on automated advice, crisis-management failures, and the risk of replacing human care with machine-mediated interaction. Recent reviews show that AI has potential in adolescent mental health care, but the evidence base remains uneven, especially in school settings and among diverse student populations. Ethical concerns are especially important because students are minors, emotionally vulnerable, and embedded in power relationships with schools, parents, teachers, and technology providers. This article examines the promise, pitfalls, and ethical challenges of AI in school mental health programs. It uses a descriptive mixed-methods design and presents an illustrative schoolbased survey dataset to analyze awareness, perceived usefulness, trust, privacy concerns, and implementation readiness among students, teachers, and counselors. The findings suggest that AI may be most useful as a supportive and preventive tool rather than as a replacement for trained mental health professionals. The study concludes that school-based AI mental health programs should be human-centered, evidence-based, transparent, privacy-protective, culturally sensitive, and supervised by qualified professionals.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, School Mental Health, Adolescents, AI Chatbots, Digital Counselling, Student Well-Being, Ethical AI, Privacy, Early Intervention, Educational Technology.
Page No: 20-29