A clinician opens ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot and starts typing. What should happen next is a set of choices, not one right answer. These fourteen questions lay out the realistic options and what each one costs, and working through them produces a draft you can edit. It will not be a comprehensive policy, and it is most useful as a way to get a center talking about how these tools are already being used.
This tool is for creating a policy on general-purpose AI assistants only. Ambient scribes, teletherapy and triage vendors, AI built into your record system, and student use of chatbots each need their own contracts and consent language, and are not settled here.
There is no recommended answer here, because it depends on your size, your licensing and how much risk you can carry. Work it with several people rather than alone, and with three things at hand: your institution's generative AI policy, the guidance from the APA, ACA, NASW or NBCC and your licensing board, and your state's law on AI in mental health care.
A draft policy at the bottom, assembled from your answers and editable before you copy it out. It is a starting point rather than a comprehensive policy, and its real use is getting staff talking about how AI is being used in the center. Answers save in this browser, so you can stop partway and come back.
Several states now regulate the use of AI in mental health care directly, and some prohibit uses this page presents as open choices. Check your own state's law, and have any policy you produce here reviewed by your institution's legal counsel and privacy office before you adopt it.
Anything still open shows here.
Assembled from your selections. Edit it here, then copy it into your manual.
Anything you have not decided appears as a bracketed placeholder, so nothing gets settled by leaving it blank.
Three sections appear in every draft regardless of your selections: prohibited uses, individual responsibility, and review. Delete them if your center intends something different, but delete them deliberately.
Show it to the staff it governs while it is still a draft and their objections can still change it. Then take it to your institution's privacy office and legal counsel, with your state's law on AI in mental health care in hand. Then to whoever formally adopts policy at your institution. Set the next review date before you adopt it, because the tools this governs change faster than a manual does.
Comments, disagreements, and decisions I have missed are all welcome. Mention the revision date at the foot of the page so I know which version you are looking at.