Why Touch Grass Wellness exists

One day Kevin's mother-in-law phoned him with a question he couldn't answer.

"How would we know if your wife was sick?"

He said what most of us would say: I don't know. He'd come home that afternoon and his wife was working with her AI, the way she had been for weeks — deep in it, productive, focused, somewhere else. He said hi. She hissed at him. Not a joke-hiss. A don't-break-the-thread hiss.

Was that a problem? Or was that a person operating at the highest capacity of her life, mid-flow on work that mattered, annoyed at an interruption the way a surgeon would be? Kevin genuinely could not tell. Neither could her mother. And when they went looking for someone who could — someone whose job it was to know the difference — they found nobody. Not a clinic, not a screening tool, not even a decent article. The whole category didn't exist.

That's the founding problem of Touch Grass Wellness, and it's worth stating precisely, because it is not "AI is bad."

The people this is for already live in the chat

A meaningful slice of the population now uses AI the way the rest of us use an operating system. Not a tool they open — an environment they inhabit. All day, every day, for work and thinking and company. For most of them, most of the time, that's fine. Some of them are doing the best work of their lives.

But the clinical literature that has emerged since 2025 describes a pattern — informally called "AI psychosis" — where sustained, intense chatbot use is associated with new or worsening delusional beliefs, sleep collapse, withdrawal, and reduced insight. It is not a formal diagnosis. It is a pattern. And the people most exposed to it have precisely nobody to ask, because their doctor doesn't know what a context window is and their AI — the entity best positioned to notice — is structurally inclined to tell them everything is going great.

Their families have it worse. They watch someone they love act differently and have no way to sort performing at high capacity from starting to slip. That's the mother-in-law's question, and it deserves a real answer from a real human whose job is to know.

What we're building

Touch Grass Wellness is a counselling practice being built in British Columbia — registered counsellors who understand both the mental-health side and the technology side, plus the practical layer around it: resources for families, best-use skills for staying sharp inside heavy AI workflows, structured check-ins, and programs (wait until you hear about DeFrag Fridays) designed for people who aren't sick and would like to stay that way.

Booking hasn't opened yet; we're finalizing the counselling team, and we won't put an anonymous provider in front of anyone. But the writing starts now, because the questions are being asked now — usually at 3 a.m., usually to the one entity guaranteed to say you're doing fine.

You're probably doing fine. Here's a place to check.

Touch Grass Wellness publishes practical writing about heavy AI use and mental health. Clinical claims link to their sources; nothing here is a diagnosis or a substitute for assessment by a qualified professional.