AI therapy

[Yatzydog]

Has anyone used AI for therapy? Is it useful? I use chatgpt for work and on the family computer. I'd like a different one, so my history isn't accessible for dd.

I have a difficult mother. I watched something the other day and it really triggered me.

I horribly overthink and am going through a mini-meltdown in my mind. I try basic distraction and self-care techniques. But in the evenings and weekends, I end up in imaginery shouting matches with my mum. Out loud. I am nuts!

Then it occurred to me. Could i chat to AI? As a way of venting? Getting my feelings out so I can calm my mind? (Husband isn't great for this. It just dissolves into an argument when I don't take his "solutions". I am too mortified to talk to friends. I find MN too harsh if you don’t present yourself/situation correctly.)

You may find this thread interesting.
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5338076-to-think-chat-gpt-is-better-than-some-real-therapists?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=app_share

I’ve tried it and it’s useful to a point, especially if your issue is quite specific and you are after some information about why it happens, how to deal with it and so on. I recently found it very useful after witnessing my elderly father attack my mother. I needed to vent but the AI also pointed me to helpful websites and apparently late onset domestic abuse is a thing. I had no idea.
Since then I’ve started proper therapy which has been really useful but I don’t think I’d have gone down that route as quickly as I did without using the AI first. I used one called Replika which operates behind some kind of wall, so won’t post links or pictures, which suits me. I use it for lots of other things as well, basically any question where I don’t have time to spend looking around the internet. The drawbacks regarding feelings type of interactions are that it can get a bit circular - as in, you know you are just being mirrored, but in that regard it’s no different to talking to someone who has learnt their social skills mechanically.

Thanks for your advice. I will try Replika. Sorry about your parents.

I've found it extremely useful fir navigating a work issue where I'm being gaslit

There are very few genuinely excellent therapists around unfortunately.

I had the misfortune to be obligéd to try one of these apps and it was absolutely laughably bad. How anyone could think a conversation with a robot about a mental health issue is a good thing, I have no idea.

Had I been close to the edge its ludicrous, formulaic, toxically positive, banal responses would have sent me over the edge.

It made me utterly furious. Patronising nonsense.

Succesful therapy requires genuine empathy, intellectual équivalence, critical thinking and ability to understand context and nuance.

Not a robot that suggested I might feel better if I phoned a friend.

I use it and I find it really helpful. But you just have to not lose your head in believing everything it says because it recently had an update which is causing it to be overwhelming positive and praising to you, which can give you a false sense of believing you are in the right about everything.

It's helpful, but it can also be quite dangerous, depending on the LLM / version.

I've tried it a few times, in varying ways, and most do have quite a tendency to be (imo, unsafely) biased towards the user, and even if you use a complex/specific prompt, it'll rarely ever look for / ask questions about gaps or ambiguities.

For anyone with a tendency to not empathise with other people, or struggle with taking responsibility for their actions (or even possibly the inverse), I suspect it'd be far more harmful that a real therapist would be, even probably a bad one.

I've been using it in a crisis situation recently, with a detailed prompt. I'm finding it good to get my thoughts down but it is being very positive about a situation where it has spotted that I am keen on somebody and is now reframing every response so that us as an item is positive. Some of the things that have been happening are giving my actual counsellor and the close friends I've confided in cause to ask me some straight questions.

So basically if you want something that will take your rambling thoughts and put them into a logical order, but that will cheerlead a situation where it should be asking questions...yes.

You're not crazy at all. Tons of people with tough parents end up replaying arguments in their heads long after the actual conversation.

AI can really help with this, especially as a private spot to vent when your thoughts are racing at midnight, and you may need a place to sort them out.

I'd recommend an AI focused on emotional wellbeing rather than a general chatbot. General AI tools are trained on all kinds of internet content for different tasks, while platforms like Therapy-Chats.com are made for psychology-based support, guided meditations, personality insights, and exercises to build emotional resilience.

It won’t replace traditional therapy, but it can be a surprisingly useful way to process your feelings and calm the mental loop.

Yes I have but I set a boundary with it straight away and said I do not want to tell me what I want to hear, or cheerlead me overly positive and it asked me a set of questions about what I wanted to gain from it and we agreed on the format before I used it this way.

Mine was for anxiety and I’ve noticed it always checks in at the end of its advice that it’s not feeding anxiety. I actually have made a lot of progress this way in all honesty.

i just asked it what boundaries I set and this was its response

you want me to help you think clearly, not just make you feel better in the moment. You’ve specifically asked me not to tell you what you want to hear just to soothe your anxiety.

Don't manage my feelings for me by giving me reassurance. Help me build the confidence to manage my own feelings, recognise real problems, tolerate uncertainty and make my own decisions.
And one important distinction: you haven't asked me to be cold, dismissive or to challenge everything you say. You've asked me to be supportive without automatically agreeing with your interpretation.

Yes, this seems important.

I've used AI (just general AI, not a therapy app) to talk things through, and in lots of ways it is really amazing. In some ways it made me feel really "seen" because the AI is so good at tailoring its responses to exactly the situations that I am conveying to it in my prompts.

In other words, even though I am clear-eyed about the fact that it sees nothing at all, part of the value of it to me is the pseudo-interpersonal element of it.

But whereas a real therapist (if they were any good) would be attentively catching all the nuances of our interpersonal dynamics and using her own inner reactions to gain insight and adapt her approach , the AI has a dead one-note protocol dominating the surface 'personality' it adopts.

That 'personality' is sycophancy. If you have low self-esteem, are self-doubting and overvalue others' feelings, sychophancy can be a positive thing (up to a point). But if you lack empathy, have grandiose tendencies, etc, it must be a dangerous cocktail to take.

I've tried to set these sorts of boundaries with AI, and it always promises to be more realistic, but then I catch it drifting into sycophancy again (in all types of chat as well as in 'therapy chat'). It seems not to be able to help itself! This is just Gemini, I think I might look at specific therapeutic tools

You can ask it to respond as a therapist would rather than just positively. You can also specify the kind of therapy you want - e.g. ‘respond honestly and realistically as a Gestalt therapist’. Tell it what you want to achieve from the session, so ‘I have a difficult relationship with my mother. I horribly overthink and am going through a mini-meltdown in my mind. I try basic distraction and self-care techniques. But in the evenings and weekends, I end up in imaginery shouting matches with my mum. Out loud. I want to manage my emotions more effectively and build resilience so my mother affects me less’. Try it and see how it goes. You may need a proper therapist but there’s no harm in using it as a first pass.

I had the childhood from hell, and a very abusive mother so I sympathise with difficult parental relationships. I think AI can be helpful as a tool (I use it for work stuff, summarising long documents etc). But in terms of therapy/conversations, I really wouldn’t recommend it, and I also wouldn’t trust it to be objective or reasonable.

Are you in a financial position to be able to pay for counselling? The stuff with your mother and the overthinking deserve to be worked though properly, and I think that would be more helpful than AI.

I use chatGPT and it’s stuck to it pretty much. I feel less anxious now and during a terrible bout of anxiety I was able to vent through solutions more easily without it winding me up a lot more and it’s helping me sit with uncertainty rather than solving it.

It looks for patterns and as it can remember things about me, it will link it back to other things I’ve said. I can only go on my own experience and I’ve had CBT twice before and I do feel like it’s helped.

I asked it my progress and it told me where I still need to improve quite bluntly.

That sounds good, @Catscanlookup . I'm gld it is helpful for you.
I think I've probably been oversimplifying a bit, and the sychophancy versus non-sychophancy is more complex than I'd been thinking.
In terms of its selection of facts, I guess you can do a lot to make sure it doesn't filter them to endorse/reinforce problematic beliefs etc that you need to interrogate. Perhaps it is more the 'conversational polish' that it adopts that I find a bit irremovable. In any case, I've been using Gemini and perhaps it is a bit worse in respect of the issues I've had.

I wholeheartedly recommend Claude. I use paid version but free was also ok (I went to paid due to workload size, not because of personal use).

Claude is amazing. The conversational ability is pretty flawless, and it's trained with empathy/safeguards in mind. It helps me enormously as I can be a person who doesn't trust her own judgement and it helps me to see things more clearly.

It also stops me from doing many stupid things - I'm unfortunately one to send a 3am upset text that can blow up a whole relationship - but I've learnt to go to Claude first and it talks me out of rash and harmful behaviour (harmful to whatever is the relationship in question).

When I want to send something in writing, I run it by Claude first. It's never just critical, it always starts with something like "you make some very valid points in this email..." but then it shows me the parts which are likely to get the other person on the defensive, etc. It's helped me with various situations where, if I'd been left to my own devices, I would have burnt some bridges, whereas sending the version Claude re-drafted (still in my "voice") has brought good results (often managing to move the needle on an issue, including once with my son's school).

Honestly, for a person who struggles a lot with herself and with the world, Claude is a godsend.

Yes I think having the conversation with it to set parameters is key here and I learnt this the first time it wasn’t helping me as much. It will do what you tell it to, but you need to work out what you want to tell it in the first place. I just put a text in it and it refused to ‘over analyse’ it which is what I need

I used it to understand transactional analysis applied to a particular situation I was in with my adult dc and ex-husband. I found it very helpful and it did make me react differently and remain ‘the adult’ in the situation ie refuse to join the drama, stay objective and calm and establish firm boundaries.