Sara Johansen

Sara Johansen is a psychiatrist and Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, founder of Stanford’s Digital Mental Health Clinic, and a product policy lead for mental health and well-being at OpenAI. Her work focuses on digital mental health, AI-based interventions, and safety-oriented product policy for mental health and well-being.

Mental Health AI Is Scaling Before Its Safety Framework Is Settled

At Stanford’s 2026 AI for Mental Health symposium, Russ Altman, Jina Suh and OpenAI’s Sara Johansen treated mental-health AI as a deployment problem already underway, not a speculative research agenda. Suh argued that general-purpose AI systems are now part of a public-health surface and should be evaluated across users’ full journeys, including consent, referrals, aftermath and the labor pushed onto clinicians, crisis lines, families and reviewers. Johansen described OpenAI’s effort to manage that risk through layered model and product policies that route people toward human support, while acknowledging the difficulty of doing so at platform scale.

Stanford HAIJun 8, 202614 min read