ChatGPT for psychologists: what it can do, and what you should never give it

Many psychologists already use ChatGPT to write an email, prepare a presentation or rephrase a text. It is a useful tool, as long as you know what you can give it. The rule is simple. Anything about your patients stays out of ChatGPT.

This page is for practitioners. It explains what ChatGPT does well for practice work, what not to do, and what to use for your session notes. Legal references are to the framework in France.

What ChatGPT can do for you

• Writing without patient data. A presentation of your practice, text for your website, an email to a colleague about a general question.
• Psychoeducation. A first draft of a handout that explains a concept simply, such as the anxiety cycle or sleep hygiene, which you then review and adapt.
• Preparing a talk. Structuring a lecture, a workshop or a training session.
• Rephrasing. Making a text clearer or shorter, as long as it contains nothing about a patient.
• Keeping up to date. Summarising a concept or an article, always checking the source, because ChatGPT can invent references.

What you should never give it

Your patients' data, even partially. Session content, a report, a detailed clinical situation or a question about a specific patient do not belong in ChatGPT. There are four reasons for this.

1. It is not a health data host

In France, hosting health data on behalf of a practitioner requires HDS certification (article L1111-8 of the French Public Health Code). The consumer version of ChatGPT is not certified. See our article on HDS-certified hosting.

2. Your conversations may be used to train models

According to OpenAI's help centre, content from personal accounts may be used to train models unless you turn off the "Improve the model for everyone" option in settings. Business and Enterprise plans do not use it by default.

3. No contract protects you

When you entrust patient data to a provider, you remain the data controller, and the GDPR requires a data processing agreement (article 28). A personal ChatGPT account does not include one. The general obligations are summarised in our article on the GDPR for private practitioners.

4. Professional confidentiality

Professional confidentiality (article 226-13 of the French Criminal Code) covers everything you learn in session. Entrusting it to a service that gives you no guarantee about who can access the data puts you at risk.

What the French health and data authorities recommend

The French National Authority for Health (HAS) and the data protection authority (CNIL) are preparing a guide on the appropriate use of AI in care (working document, February 2026). Several principles apply directly to your practice.

• Only share the data a tool needs. Data that identifies the patient is rarely useful.
• Stay in control. The professional checks what the tool produces and compares it with their own clinical reasoning.
• Have health data hosted by an HDS-certified provider.

ChatGPT's mistakes

ChatGPT can state false things confidently, or invent a reference or a figure. It replaces neither your clinical analysis, nor supervision, nor a literature search. Use it as a draft, never as a source.

For your session notes, a tool built for the job

The task where AI saves psychologists the most time is note-taking and the session report. It is also the one that needs the most care. You need a tool designed for health data, with HDS-certified hosting, a data processing agreement and pseudonymisation. Our article on choosing note-taking software sets out the criteria.

Delta was designed with psychologists. During the session, Delta transcribes what is said, then writes the session report within moments, taking your specialty and therapeutic approach into account. You can also dictate your observations right after the session. The report is added to the patient's record, so you find the whole follow-up and how it has evolved in one place.

Data stays in Europe, on infrastructure certified for health data (HDS), and AI processing runs on servers located in France. The patient's name and any information that could identify them are pseudonymised before reaching the AI, no audio file is kept, and the data is never used to train models. More details on the Delta for psychologists page.