"I'm Not Able to Be There for You": Emotional Labour, Responsibility, and AI in Peer Support
For designers and researchers of AI in mental health, this paper highlights the overlooked role of responsibility distribution in peer support, challenging the dominant framing of AI as a scaling tool.
The study examines how peer supporters in digital mental health settings navigate emotional labour and responsibility, finding that institutional ambiguity concentrates these burdens on individuals. Participants evaluated AI not by empathy but by how it redistributes risk and accountability, leading to design recommendations that center responsibility over scalability.
Peer support is increasingly positioned as a scalable response to gaps in mental health care, particularly in digitally mediated settings, yet what counts as peer support and how responsibility is distributed remain unevenly defined in practice. Drawing on interviews with peer supporters, we show how lived experience, moral commitment, and self-identification shape participation while blurring expectations around scope, authority, and accountability. Institutional ambiguity concentrates emotional labour, boundary-setting, and escalation of responsibility at the individual level, often without consistent organisational scaffolding. Participants evaluated AI not primarily through empathy or technical capability, but through how technologies redistribute risk, labour, and accountability within already fragile support roles. Building on these findings, we outline design futures for an AI-supported peer support ecosystem that foregrounds responsibility as a central design concern rather than treating AI as a mechanism of scale.