I just have an adverse intellectual and emotional reaction when I hear people suggest AI / some app is the solution to mental illness. It devalues the hard and thankless work that therapists do, reduces people's deep suffering to a trivial engineering problem, naively presumes superiority to the centuries of research humankind has done on the mind and suffering, and is just logically and factually incorrect
There are plenty of ways to improve access to care that would have more cost-effective benefit than AI. If people started investing in those then maybe we could actually see some improvement
/endrant
I wonder which are those other cost-effective ways to improve access to care you refer to...
Some examples of cost effective interventions include better mental health and substance abuse treatment in primary care (methadone tx for example), integration of medical and behavioral health reimbursement and relaxing some onerous rules like not being able to bull for medical and behavioral services on the same day (though I think this is improving), better training and supervision for mental health professionals, more rigorous research into group therapy, Better education on psychiatric meds for PCPs, more follow up etc
I don’t think it can replace the human relationship, but it could act as helper, a listener, or something between the patient and the therapist. It could listen for hours very cheap, provide feedback, replay things previously said by the patient helping in auto reflection, create a report for the therapist, etc.
Yes, we do need the therapeutic relationship, but for most that is too expensive. Take for example someone that can only afford 2 therapies a month. That’s simply not enough in times of crisis, when the thoughts in your head can be compared with a bull stampede.