(1) The demand for mental health services is an order of magnitude vs the supply, but the demand we see is a fraction of the demand that exists because a lot of people, especially men, aren't believers in the "therapeutic culture"
In the days of Freud you could get a few hours of intensive therapy a week but today you're lucky to get an hour a week. An AI therapist can be with you constantly.
(2) I believe psychodiagnosis based on text analysis could greatly outperform mainstream methods. Give an AI someone's social media feed and I think depression, mania, schizo-* spectrum, disordered narcissism and many other states and traits will be immediately visible.
(3) Despite the CBT revolution and various attempts to intensify CBT, a large part of the effectiveness of therapy comes from the patient feeling mirrored by the therapist [1] and the LLM can accomplish this, in fact, this could be accomplished by the old ELIZA program.
(4) The self of the therapist can be both an obstacle and an instrument to progress. See [2] On one level the reactions that a therapist feels are useful, but they also get in the way of the therapist providing perfect mirroring [3] and letting optimal frustration unfold in the patient instead of providing "corrective emoptional experiences." I'm going to argue that the AI therapist can be trained to "perceive" the things a human therapist perceives but that it does not have its own reactions that will make the patient feel judged and get in the way of that unfolding.
(1) The demand for mental health services is an order of magnitude vs the supply, but the demand we see is a fraction of the demand that exists because a lot of people, especially men, aren't believers in the "therapeutic culture"
In the days of Freud you could get a few hours of intensive therapy a week but today you're lucky to get an hour a week. An AI therapist can be with you constantly.
(2) I believe psychodiagnosis based on text analysis could greatly outperform mainstream methods. Give an AI someone's social media feed and I think depression, mania, schizo-* spectrum, disordered narcissism and many other states and traits will be immediately visible.
(3) Despite the CBT revolution and various attempts to intensify CBT, a large part of the effectiveness of therapy comes from the patient feeling mirrored by the therapist [1] and the LLM can accomplish this, in fact, this could be accomplished by the old ELIZA program.
(4) The self of the therapist can be both an obstacle and an instrument to progress. See [2] On one level the reactions that a therapist feels are useful, but they also get in the way of the therapist providing perfect mirroring [3] and letting optimal frustration unfold in the patient instead of providing "corrective emoptional experiences." I'm going to argue that the AI therapist can be trained to "perceive" the things a human therapist perceives but that it does not have its own reactions that will make the patient feel judged and get in the way of that unfolding.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rogers
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countertransference
[3] why settle for less?
[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010440X6...