Mormon Mental Health, Scrupulosity, and AI Ethics: What Happens When the Algorithm Sounds Like God?
By Dr. Kristy Money, Neuropsychologist & Media Manager, Mormon Mental Health Association
Last night, Pope Leo released a statement on the ethics of artificial intelligence.
At nearly the same moment, Utah leaders were discussing massive AI infrastructure expansion, including the proposed 40,000-acre data center development near North Salt Lake outside the Salt Lake City area.
And honestly? As a Mormon mental health professional, I don’t think those two conversations are unrelated.
Because counselors, psychologists, and LDS therapists are increasingly sitting with questions that would have sounded bizarre even five years ago:
● Can AI worsen scrupulosity or religious OCD?
● What happens when spiritually anxious clients start outsourcing moral reassurance to ChatGPT?
● How do high-demand religious cultures interact with algorithmic certainty?
● What does “discernment” even mean when an AI can instantly generate a spiritually-toned answer that sounds calm, authoritative, and emotionally regulating?
I specialize in ADHD and autism assessment, but like many Mormon mental health professionals, I increasingly find myself working at the intersection of anxiety, perfectionism, shame, religious trauma, and scrupulosity in LDS culture.
And one thing I’ve noticed clinically is this:
People with scrupulosity are often not actually searching for truth.
They’re searching for relief.
Because reassurance-seeking can wear many disguises:
● excessive prayer
● repeated confession
● compulsive repentance
● endless research
● checking thoughts for “worthiness”
● repeatedly asking leaders or therapists if something is “okay”
● even compulsively consuming mental health or spiritual content online
AI now enters that ecosystem in a very interesting way.
For some people, it may genuinely increase access to psychoeducation, emotional support, or therapeutic language. For others (especially those vulnerable to OCD, religious anxiety, or perfectionism) it could become an infinitely available reassurance machine.
And Mormon culture, specifically, has some unique dynamics here.
Many LDS clients are already navigating:
● hypervigilance around morality
● fear of spiritual failure
● black-and-white thinking
● pressure toward certainty
● intense self-monitoring
● anxiety around “promptings”
● concerns about whether thoughts are sinful, selfish, lazy, prideful, impure, or spiritually dangerous
Mormon mental health clinicians need to understand the ways religious environments can shape symptom expression.
That’s part of culturally competent therapy.
And honestly, I think this is one reason conversations around AI ethics matter so much for counselors right now.
Because the future is not abstract anymore.
It’s already here:
● AI therapists
● AI companions
● AI-generated religious content
● AI sermon summaries
● AI scripture study tools
● AI emotional coaching
● AI “life advice”
And now enormous AI infrastructure projects are physically reshaping Utah itself. 40,000 ACRES, y’all. Not square feet. ACRES.
Interestingly, some of the public response to this has actually felt psychologically healthy to me. The backlash around the proposed North Salt Lake AI data center, along with the increasingly skeptical reactions college students around the country are having toward pro-AI messaging, suggests people are not passively accepting technological expansion without questioning its human cost. Even last week, students reportedly booed a commencement speech praising AI by the CEO of Google. Whether one agrees with those reactions or not, they reflect something important: people are still asking moral, environmental, existential, and psychological
questions about what kind of future we are building.
As therapists in LDS and post-LDS spaces, we’re going to have to think carefully about how technology interacts with nervous systems already primed toward perfectionism, shame, fear, and compulsive certainty-seeking.
The question is probably not: “Is AI good or bad?”
The better clinical question may be: “What psychological need is this tool meeting for this particular person?”
Now that’s a much more useful place to start.