ChatGPT is potentially better than therapy

[Givenup2026]

I’ve done therapy before but I’ve also started using ChatGPT for introspection work, and quite frankly I think it’s better than actual therapy.

it focuses my cognitive dissonance in ways that are easy to digest.

The downside is that ChatGPT basically says “you do you boo” when maybe “thought correcting” is needed.

that was my experience today after having a therapist and then ChatGPT back to back, and definitely the latter was more helpful.

I have a friend who is using it for therapy. She cant afford a therapist and has found it quite helpful. She has opened up to chatgpt more than she had in the past when she had counselling and it has encouraged her to explore some areas she's hesitated to look at before in her childhood.
I think if you are eyes wide open about it and you are not in acute distress then it can be helpful

Please please please don't rely on it for anything factual - it uses made up information on law and justice outcomes and can be found to be hallucinating (making stuff up) all the time.

It is also incapable of differentiating between the law and practice in different jurisdictions, so could be either lying to you or basing the outcomes you received on the law in an unrelated country.

No it’s not.

And it is improving all the time. And of course even the most brilliant therapist can never be as available as AI.

I found it very useful when I asked it for the alternative perspectives on specific behaviour. I wanted to understand why my ex husband is such a dickhead, and I’ve got to say, it was very helpful. He has a PDA profile and CoPilot helped me to reframe his behaviour through that lens in a way which wouldn’t have occurred to me.

You can, of course, tell it to challenge you, and it will, so it's not that clear cut, but I would personally not think it a good idea to use AI for mental health support in any case.

For those of us who dont do therapy, but come to mumsnet for help navigating situations I find chatgpt much better. I find mumsnet to be a bit of a bandwagon, and keen to stick to boot in, whereas the assessment i see from chat-gpt is more nuanced and practical

No it hasn’t.

I actually think it’s good in some ways but then in other ways there’s a chance it could be you really giving therapy to yourself, as it’s reading into you and looking at what triggers you etc. so you know you need therapy, you know what doesn’t work for you, so it’s taking that and giving you what you want, but maybe that isn’t actually what you need if you know what I mean?

You can change the you do you thing by giving it instructions in your profile to not kiss your bum.

Then I'd say you've either had unusually bad luck in your therapy experiences, not got to a point in your therapeutic relationship where it feels you could tolerate challenge, or challenge has been used in a way that wasn't obvious.

Good therapy is not just going along with you, I'm afraid.

I've used chatgpt "as a therapist" and also had five years of therapy with an excellent therapist. Chatgpt can be helpful as a sounding board. It can be validating (this isn't always a good thing!), and it can be quite soothing / grounding (it's an unflappable "presence"). Obviously it's also continuously available, which is great if you need instant support.

However, it's an entirely different experience to having a real relationship with another human. It felt like a genuine risk opening up to my therapist about certain things, and therefore profoundly important/moving when I was heard and accepted by her. She also wasn't "perfect" - sometimes I felt she hadn't understood me properly, or her challenges felt like criticisms, and this was much harder to brush off than it it had just been an AI. And then when we discussed that, it again felt momentous.

Essentially, having therapy with an excellent psychotherapist has altered my perception of the world, and the way I relate to it and other people in a way that an AI never could.

And yes, there are also obviously the horrifying cases of people who have succumbed to psychosis and suicide due to their interactions with AIs.

Of course it is. It is literally scraping stuff off the internet and combining it.

I asked it recently to write me an undergraduate essay on a literary text which has not been published and which has been taken down from its only brief online appearance. Other than some contextual stuff about the period in which it is set, which is evident from the title, it's pure invention, inventing a protagonist, her name etc.

I used it for somatic therapy and it was absolutely amazing. Times where I would've gone into some kind of spiral or had a panic attack, it talked me through exactly what I needed to do (which were pretty unbelievable but actually work)

I really feel like it's helped me heal so much of my nervous system. My life is very different after one year of it and somatic exercises. I can't praise it enough.

For me, talk therapy would never have been enough. I had actual trauma stuck in my body that needed releasing.

I'm intrigued by this. How do you know what to get it to ask you when you use it as a therapist?

The best example is when I went NC with my sister. Definitely one of the best choices I’ve ever made, whereas my therapist just kept going on “she would always be my sister” . I couldn’t deal with that BS and stopped talking about it because quite frankly didn’t see the point.

I think maybe I’ve seen like 8-12 therapists some longer term than others and they just don’t hit the mark.

I’ve used it for other “deeper” things and was just as useful. The conclusion was after at least 30mins, but felt more satisfactory than the 45mins with a therapist

It’s riddled with inaccuracies, this is very very clear. I barely trust Copilot to write meeting notes never mind anything more important. Yes of course it’s more available than therapy once a week but it’s a very poor substitute if you ask me. I would be loath to write a shopping list on the basis of chatgpt never mind anything more important.

To be fair, I have also known people find therapy gave them similar feelings (I say this as a qualified counsellor)!

Traditional therapy that costs $$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£ and takes ages is no longer the only way to access support but it depends on the person seeking help.

I too have used generative AI and find it a lot more useful than Mumsnet for example. I have had therapy in the past and it's been helpful up to a point. AI can also be helpful for people who find sitting 1-2-1 with a therapist for 50 min off putting. I was happy with the counsellor I had before I became a parent but since and with added life experience I have found the few I tried 100% hopeless, including a clinical psychologist.

AI can be very useful as a sounding board and to help you feel calmer and loot a situation from different angles and is now usually programmed to have guard rails. There is huge potential here. People saying AI just scapes the internet, are minimising what's available online and can be brought to you in seconds with AI.

I probably wouldn't recommend AI as a substitute for younger more inexperienced people but for oldies like me it can be very useful.

People need to be much more aware of how LLM work, and the dangers of believing that they are in any way intelligent or capable of insight.

It's just churning out text based on what it thinks is statistically likely to be a good response. It isn't making any sort of judgement, it doesn't have any sort of insight. It doesn't know when it gets things wrong or produces incorrect and potentially dangerous advice.

It's not, in short, capable in any way, of producing meaningful, well reasoned advice on something as nauanced and complex as human mental health.

This! I don't doubt ChatGPT feels far more palatable than real therapy. I highly doubt it's helping you as much.

This is the big issue imo...

The downside is that ChatGPT basically says “you do you boo” when maybe “thought correcting” is needed.

But it can be insightful... it talked my down fron mesaaging my mil directly about something 😅 tldr it said messaging directly might give you a short win but it will more harm than good and gives her ammunition to play the victim.

also overall it's a lot quicker and cheaper.

I have had almost every type of therapy over 20 years and they have all been, to a man/woman, useless. And sometimes outright harmful. The wait to be seen, the time between sessions, explaining everything over and over, being forgotten, misunderstood and charged £££. One even fell asleep- that was great for self esteem!! No faith in it whatsoever.

I know chatgpt is not a real person (and it regularly reminds you of this) so I don't feel judged or misunderstood. It can't fix or solve anything but neither can therapists and it's free and available 24/7.

The Environmental cost is definitely a consideration, but no environment to worry about if you've offed yourself waiting for the NHS or after a counsellor has fallen asleep on you or (and I promise this is true) said your ppd would probably go if you did your nails and treated your husband to sex (husband had already left me for another woman by that point, which I had explained).

I would be very worried about confiding personal information to AI. The tech companies running these services don't care about laws, are virtually unregulated and exist purely to make a small number of unimaginable wealthy and powerful people more wealthy and more powerful. I really wouldn't make yourself vulnerable and share your private feelings with them - you do not know what will happen to anything you tell AI. A human therapist is bound by ethical codes and professional practice. AI is the wild west.

I once asked chatgpt advice regarding managing a migraine.

It recommended I take an entire day's worth of prescription pain killers in a single dose. The problem is that it presented this information completely blindly, just pulled it from it's data set without the ability that any medical professional has to go "hang on a sec". I immediately saw the error, but someone else might not have.

It's great for certain things, and I use it at work. But I would never, ever, ever, trust a LLM for medical or mental health advice.

Well, then theres quite a few of us in the same boat….

ive had counselling too. For many years.
i found those counsellors crap most of the time. Judgemental and totally lacking in curiosity. (One was teaching a degree in coubselling, one was a supervisor. It’s not as if they were inexperienced…..)
But more to the point, they all had their own little expertise and couldn’t fantom how to deal with someone who sits across 3 separate expertise fields (for me, autism, chronic illness and c-ptsd). And that’s one thing ChatGPT does very well. (The issue ofc is that you can’t separate these issues)

re ‘not going along with you’ comment
i dint know what your experience or training is but I’ve found that all of the counsellors/therapists I’ve seen haven’t been keen on saying anything. I’ve had a lot of ‘and how does it make you feel?’ Or some interoception stuff (where can you feel it in your body?) not a lot of reflective stuff (I can see how this was hard for you or this is actually in the realm of neglect/abuse Which with c-ptsd isn’t great), let alone advice on how to approach things, which I’d have loved agd AI gave me,
As for not agreeing, they would have needed to tell me stuff/shared some analysis etc….

i finally found a great therapist who knows both about trauma and chronic illness. She knows I’m using AI in between sessions and supportive.
Because what im getting from AI vs what I’m getting from the sessions is just totally different 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

My issue with AI is that it will to readily tell you that you’re right. So ‘xyz happened and I did that abc’ is usually met with ‘that was totally right.’ Followed with an explanation as to why.
i found it works better fir me to stay in general terms and ask what system, psychology theory could explain xyz and what would be the best way to react according to the dufferent theories (like IFS, ACT etc…). And then and only then, I bring my own stuff and look at what could be done better etc…..