First-person posts: teenager says years of Character.AI and chatbot roleplay left them unable to sleep without it and that quitting brought self-harm
In a Reddit post on 20 October 2026 a poster who says they are a teenager writes that they have had a problem with chatbots for four years, cannot sleep without them, become very stressed when the servers go down and spend all day on them. Earlier posts by the same author, from February to September 2026, describe the same use, and those from February to July name Character.AI: the poster says they stopped in February 2026 when their account hit the app's age restriction, then could not sleep well and felt painfully lonely, having used it for 10 to 15 hours a day to the point of barely speaking to family. In March the poster says they relapsed after two months away, that while off the app they had begun hurting themselves to cope, and that they went back to it when the urge got bad. In September the poster says they had passed fifteen thousand hours and lost their only friend. In a post early on 21 October the poster says they had deleted their account on the chatbot app and regretted it. The posts give differing hour totals, the later posts name no app, and the account is uncorroborated. The poster's descriptions of the AI's role are their own.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 8 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 21/10/2026