You're good at your job. You've spent years building skills, earning trust, developing expertise. And then one day, you watch a piece of software do in thirty seconds what used to take you three hours — and something shifts. Not just professionally. Something shifts inside.

That unsettled feeling — the low-grade dread about relevance, the checking of job boards late at night, the way your confidence falters in meetings — has a name now. Researchers at the University of Florida are calling it AI Replacement Dysfunction, or AIRD, and they're urging the mental health community to pay attention before the wave of psychological distress it carries becomes a full-blown crisis.

A New Condition for a New Era

In February 2026, University of Florida researchers published a landmark clinical framework in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science formally proposing AIRD as a clinically relevant condition — one that mental health providers, educators, and policymakers urgently need to recognize.

The framework emerged from an observation that UF psychology student and researcher Stephanie McNamara made in early 2025: AI-induced layoffs were rising, yet no one in the clinical community had established a structured way to assess or treat the psychological fallout. "I saw no one was discussing this phenomenon, so I took it upon myself to propose a clinical dysfunction based on this," she explained.

Working alongside UF clinical associate professor of psychiatry Dr. Joseph Thornton, M.D., McNamara developed AIRD as a framework describing the psychological distress that arises from persistent fear of professional obsolescence in the age of artificial intelligence. It outlines specific symptoms, screening approaches, and treatment pathways — and it issues a clear call to action for the mental health field.

What AIRD Actually Looks Like

AIRD doesn't announce itself cleanly. It rarely starts with a dramatic breakdown or a pink slip. More often, it seeps in gradually — a creeping anxiety you can't quite locate, a hollowness in work that used to feel meaningful, a defensive irritability when AI tools are brought up in team meetings. According to the UF research, AIRD may manifest across cognitive, emotional, and behavioral dimensions.

Because these symptoms overlap significantly with generalized anxiety disorder, major depression, and adjustment disorder, the UF researchers emphasize the need for targeted screening questions that connect symptoms specifically to AI-related occupational fears — rather than misattributing them to unrelated causes and missing the underlying driver entirely.

This Isn't Just a Personal Problem — It's a Population-Level Crisis

The fear is not unfounded. In 2025 alone, nearly 55,000 U.S. job cuts were directly attributed to AI, according to workforce analytics firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Major companies — from Workday to Salesforce to Amazon — explicitly cited AI automation when announcing workforce reductions. For those who still have their jobs, the anxiety isn't simply about being laid off. It's something more insidious.

Researchers have begun calling it FOBO: the Fear of Becoming Obsolete. Unlike traditional layoff anxiety, FOBO is the slow erosion of professional confidence — the sense that your skills are degrading in real time, that you're falling behind faster than you can catch up, and that the window to stay relevant is quietly closing. According to Pew Research, 52% of workers report worrying about AI's long-term impact on their careers. A 2026 workplace mental health study found that 13% of employees identify AI-related worry as a direct driver of their burnout.

The Brookings Institution has identified that 6.1 million U.S. workers — about 4.2% of the workforce — face both high AI exposure and low adaptive capacity, meaning they are least equipped to transition if displacement occurs. These workers are disproportionately women, concentrated in clerical and administrative roles, and geographically clustered in mid-sized cities with fewer alternative employment options. The mental health burden of AIRD will not be distributed equally.

The World Economic Forum projects that 85 to 92 million jobs could be displaced globally by 2030. At the same time, 97 to 170 million new roles are expected to emerge — a net positive on paper. But as the UF researchers and labor economists alike point out, net positive employment numbers do not mean smooth transitions for individual workers. The gap between displacement and re-entry — particularly for mid-career workers, older employees, and those without graduate credentials — is exactly where AIRD takes root and grows.

Who Is Most at Risk?

Why Work Disruption Cuts So Deep

To understand why AI-driven job insecurity hits so hard psychologically, it helps to understand what work actually means to most people. For the majority of adults, a job is not simply a source of income. It is a source of identity, social connection, structure, mastery, and purpose — core psychological needs identified across decades of American Psychological Association research.

When that foundation is threatened — not by a single dramatic event, but by the slow, relentless pressure of technological displacement — the psychological response mirrors what we see in other forms of chronic stress. The threat detection system activates. Cortisol levels rise. Sleep degrades. Cognitive flexibility narrows. And the person experiencing this often can't fully articulate why they feel so uneasy, because there's no single moment to point to. It's not a firing — it's a slow fading.

This is precisely why AIRD can go undiagnosed for so long: it resembles existing conditions closely, its trigger is diffuse, and both patients and clinicians may fail to connect the symptoms to their source. The UF framework addresses this gap directly, giving the clinical community a structured lens through which to recognize and respond to this emerging form of distress. Understanding the evidence-based treatments for anxiety disorders — including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which targets exactly the kind of catastrophic thinking that AIRD fuels — is an important part of the clinical response.

Taking Back Control: A Mental Health Response to AI Anxiety

The good news — and there genuinely is good news here — is that AIRD is treatable. The psychological tools developed for anxiety, occupational stress, and identity disruption translate directly. What matters is recognizing the problem for what it is rather than dismissing it as weakness or irrational worry.

1. Name What You're Feeling

   AIRD thrives in vagueness. Naming your anxiety as specifically job-and-AI-related — rather than a generalized "stress" — is the first step toward being able to work with it therapeutically. Journaling, structured reflection, or working with a therapist trained in occupational stress can help externalize and examine these fears.

2. Separate Identity from Job Title

   Much of AIRD's bite comes from a deep fusion of self-worth and occupational role. Therapeutic work focused on values clarification — who you are independent of what you do — is highly effective in reducing this vulnerability. This is a core element of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as delivered via telepsychiatry.

3. Challenge Catastrophic Thinking

   The AIRD-driven mind tends toward worst-case scenarios: I'll be replaced, I'm irrelevant, there's no future for me here. CBT techniques — particularly cognitive restructuring — are specifically designed to interrupt these thought spirals and replace them with more accurate, balanced assessments of risk and possibility.

4. Address the Sleep and Physical Toll

   Chronic occupational anxiety degrades sleep, which in turn worsens anxiety and impairs the cognitive flexibility needed to adapt. A comprehensive treatment approach addresses the full loop: anxiety → sleep disruption → reduced resilience → more anxiety. Psychiatric evaluation and medication management, when appropriate, can provide significant relief during this cycle.

5. Build Community Around the Experience

   Dr. Thornton's observation that AI displacement is an "invisible disaster" requiring community-level responses points to something important: isolation amplifies AIRD. Group therapy, peer support, and community mental health resources can normalize the experience, reduce shame, and create the collaborative environment in which healing happens.

6. Seek Professional Help Early

   The UF researchers are explicit: mental health professionals need to be part of the response to AI-era workforce disruption — not just career coaches and HR departments. If your anxiety about AI and work is persistent, affecting your sleep, relationships, or sense of self-worth, it is exactly the kind of challenge that telepsychiatry is built to address — accessibly, affordably, and from wherever you are.

Telepsychiatry: Care Without Adding Another Barrier

There is something particularly fitting about the idea that telepsychiatry — a form of care enabled by technology — is well-positioned to help people navigate the mental health impacts of technology-driven disruption. At East Coast Telepsychiatry, our board-certified psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, and licensed therapists work with individuals experiencing the full spectrum of conditions that AI-era stress can trigger or worsen: generalized anxiety disorder, major depression, insomnia, adjustment disorder, and occupational burnout.

We understand that if you're already overwhelmed by work stress and career uncertainty, the last thing you need is a complex intake process, a long waitlist, or the logistical challenge of getting to an in-person appointment. Our model is built to remove those barriers. Secure video appointments, flexible scheduling, and coverage across New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida mean that high-quality psychiatric care is available when and where you need it — on your terms.

We accept most major insurance plans and offer self-pay options. If you've been struggling with anxiety, low motivation, sleep disruption, or a sense that your professional identity is slipping away in the face of AI-driven change, you don't need to manage that alone. What you're experiencing is real, it is recognized, and it is treatable.