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It’s cheap, quick and available 24/7, but is a chatbot therapist really the right tool to tackle complex emotional needs?
YES! Those are the things therapy for anxiety and depression is supposed to help you with! If the AI “Therapist” won’t help with those problems, it’s not there to actually help you.
Eating, getting dressed, and talking with real people are all good things for your mental health. Typing on a keyboard doesn’t help, otherwise we’d be the least depressed generation ever.
I tried doing online text-based therapy once. On top of it’s not the same thing, it was also just the absolute worst way to go about doing therapy, and that was with a human.
It’s also straight up not true that it’s the only way to get traditional therapy! I had therapy over the phone for months to treat PTSD and it was something I wish I’d done years ago. A human therapist was able to understand how my trauma was affecting me in ways I didn’t see until later.
The idea of entrusting any of that to a LLM as anything other than a temporary stopgap is horrifying, because they’re nowhere near sophisticated enough to deal with something as complicated as the needs of someone who is having mental health problems. If you wouldn’t trust a LLM for advice on how to treat your cancer then you shouldn’t trust this either.
Bit of a catch-22 though, isn’t it? You want people to get better at doing those things, but they have to do those things in the first place to reach the people that help them get better at it.
I see nothing wrong with having AI chatbots in addition to traditional therapists. As with many AI applications they’re at their best when they’re helping professionals to get more done.
I’m not sure why, but you seem to have posted this yesterday but it didn’t show up until an hour ago. Your instance may be having some issues.
I do get where you’re coming from with all that, but the act of going to therapy itself is an achievement a patient can benefit from, and should be considered from the start. If that truly isn’t possible for someone, voice calls from a real therapist are a reasonable next step.
Also, the original question was, “Can AI replace therapists?”. I can see some meaningful benefits coming from an AI assisting a therapist, but that’s not what I was getting at. AI alone really just feels like a bandaid on a bullet wound, when applying pressure or a tourniquet is also available.
No, the original question is “can AI therapists do better than the real thing?” And yes, they can do better at specific things. That doesn’t make them a replacement, though.
Bandaids aren’t much use for a bullet wound, but bandaids are still good to have and useful in other situations. You wouldn’t use a tourinquet for a papercut.
I haven’t been into a therapists office in 7 years now, and I’ve been in active therapy for all 7 of the intervening years.
I agree that typing on a keyboard isn’t a substitute for therapy. Writing can serve as an creative outlet for emotion in the same way as music or painting.
“Getting to a place” being a barrier may be a bit of a stretch (unless it’s like really far and interferes with your work, etc.), but actually deciding to do therapy, what kind, finding a good therapist, and setting up the first appointment - that can be quite a massive barrier.
Don’t discount how paralyzing executive dysfunction can be when all you have to do is ‘go to a place’.
I’m sure it can, but then how does one even have the appointment set up in the first place? Which is a much harder part of the process (especially when starting from zero).
That’s the fun part!
But it is a complex process. Often times getting the appt scheduled will be the blocker for me, but it’s always the cascade behind it that is the real issue. I can schedule appointments all day long, but when I know it’s committing me to an office visit, follow-ups, insurance or out of pocket payment, shuffling my day around to make it fit, and all other manner of ‘things’ that are suddenly on my plate that weren’t before it turns into a whole thing. I’m usually at my best when I can just be in the present and get what needs to be done right now done without worrying about that cascade.
But then, say I manage that and the appointment is coming up and I am back in that headspace considering all the cascading effects of going to that appointment…. I have to brute force every single step or all the work I’ve done til now gets wasted. If I’m lucky enough I can sunken cost my way into productivity. Otherwise it’s a constant practice in gaslighting myself to stop thinking about the forest for the trees (which still sucks because at least the forest is just one big thing while the trees are millions of little things which might be worse) just to stay functional.
I’m very close to finally getting prescribed a stimulant that my psych thinks will help with all of this and I’m very keen to see if it helps.