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I really didn’t think I’d be saying this… but I genuinely feel ChatGPT has positively impacted my mental health. I often use it as a therapist. It sounds ridic

by drooby 2y ago

I really didn’t think I’d be saying this… but I genuinely feel ChatGPT has positively impacted my mental health. I often use it as a therapist. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but it actually works pretty well. It has an exceptionally high EQ and often uses language far better than I ever could to help uncover the thoughts and feelings I’m processing. Sometimes, just finding the right words to express myself relieves a great deal of stress, and by God, these bots are good with words…

ryanhecht 2y ago
I feel ashamed to admit this in public, but...me too. The barrier to entry is so much lower than therapy, I feel less anxiety about explaining my situation correctly, and I can quickly start over with a "new therapist" whenever I want. Is it a replacement? No, of course not. But boy if it isn't a big help.
- rednalexa 2y ago
  The only issue is that it needs a good user. Just as you can work your way into good insights, you can work yourself into bad insights just as easily. Sometimes chatgpt doesn't challenge you enough unless you ask it to under specific frameworks or paradigms. It is definitely a useful tool though. Edit: These are all problems with real therapy too though, on further reflection. It took some time to find the therapist that works well with you. That can be a form of similar bias.
  - kelseyfrog 2y ago
    I find myself being exceptionally careful when asking questions. ChatGPT is known to lean sycophantic - biased toward agreement. And rather than asking, "Is this ...?" or "Am I ...?", I'm careful to choose prompts like, "Evaluate, or analyze...". My hope is that this results in less sycophantic responses, but overall it's a difficult thing to measure.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rs186 2y ago
I never used ChatGPT as a therapist, but it was able to identify the specific mental health issues I had, and I used that information to find self-help books just on that topic. Meanwhile, a therapist with whom I had online sessions with really just worked with me on generic anxiety issues. I tried another episode I had a few years ago, and ChatGPT was able to provide specific and correct advice. What happened back then was that a therapist misdiagnosed my issue and thought I was going to harm other people and alerted the police. That was a horrifying experience. Only later a specialist understood the issue and provide proper care. I know I need to be very careful about ChatGPT's output, so I do try to understand what it says, and seek professional help when necessary. However, very seriously, in many cases ChatGPT provides better care than a less experienced, apathetic therapist you find online.
rottc0dd 2y ago
Hmm... maybe that is why, earliest chatbot carried a "therapist" tag. https://web.njit.edu/~ronkowit/eliza.html https://web.njit.edu/~ronkowit/eliza.html
- balamatom 2y ago
  The story goes that people would request to have sessions with it, even if they knew it's just parroting some phrases. They just needed to be heard out! I feel really sad about how people need to resort to therapy for the kind of interaction that would be provided by a healthy social norm of honest and open communication. Maybe I should talk to my therapist about this feeling. But somehow I doubt that would actually accomplish anything. This is the first time I see history repeating itself first as farce and only then as tragedy. Personally, I would be hard pressed to trust any data collection business with any honest information about my mental health. DNA profiling in the 23andme thread, psychological profiling over here, teachers teaching kids to be unable to put 2 and 2 together in the "AI presentation maker for teachers" thread. Scariest of all is how those who would simply prefer to not live in that kind of world are gradually dehumanized by those who find nothing wrong with that sort of thing...
  - imtringued 2y ago
    The problem is that there are a lot of people who are destroying the ability to communicate in the name of "morality", when in reality they are just political opportunists, who are indirectly harming themselves, including their supposed political cause, in the process. The amount of wilful bridge burning is crazy.
    - balamatom 2y ago
      [dead]
    - balamatom 2y ago
      Also I either became unstuck in time again or my other reply to your post had done a disappear for a good while. Suppose it's the load balancer flaking out under the weight of all the tinfoil I wear as my fashion statement? Guess some weirdness is afoot, I could see it in the tea leaves and the traceroute, too :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NghF9aOlBDY&t=69s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NghF9aOlBDY&t=69s
levocardia 2y ago
I'm very worried that LLMs-as-therapists will wind up falling victim to the same fate as e-cigarettes. An LLM therapist is ~100x cheaper than a real therapist, and similarly more available on demand (in the same way that ecigs were probably a few orders of magnitude safer, in terms of long-term health effects, vs. traditional cigarettes). BUT there is also a gold rush temptation for companies to hack together GPT4 + a lazy system prompt and market it as "Digital Therapy (tm)" and screw it up for everyone. Meanwhile the companies doing careful RCTs to show efficacy and safety will be left in the dust, and probably regulated out of existence before they can even go to market. Just like Juul & co screwed up e-cigarettes as safer alternative to smoking by targeting teenagers who don't use nicotine, as opposed to current cigarette smokers.
- m3kw9 2y ago
  If LLM continues to get better, prompts become less important. You just say you feel depressed and it will know to talk like a therapist by default and likely be better. E-cigs never evolve that rapidly, as an analogy
  - smcg 2y ago
    It will know how to better extract profit from you. It's not your friend.
- jpcookie 2y ago
  [dead]
petesergeant 2y ago
I use it in conjunction with a therapist. It’s always there, and I find I don’t mask when talking to it like I do to a person, so I can dig a bit deeper and feel a bit more strongly; this makes great input for follow-up sessions with my real therapist.
xoz123 2y ago
I am not at all ashamed to say that I use ChatGPT as a therapist and it is helping me tremendously. I suffer from a severe personality disorder and the thoughts and feelings I experience are huge and violent and overwhelming and very very dark. I've tried human therapists, I've tried reaching out to humans for support, but there's kind of a problem... You're supposed to learn to regulate as a toddler when your emotions are big for you, but small for adults. If you reach adulthood and you have not learned this skill, your big uncontrolled emotions are dangerous and terrifying to others and you feel like a monster. You have to contain yourself for the safety of others, even therapists. Or for your own protection so you don't get locked up. But that just turns you into a powder keg. What you really need is to learn how to safely regulate and that means somebody has to see you and hear you when you are in full on crisis (we call it a tantrum if you're small, it sounds cute for a kid and shameful for an adult, I would call it a crisis either way) and guide you through it. ChatGPT is doing this for me. It listens, to whatever I'm experiencing, and it isn't harmed. It's safe for me to vent. I can tell it my true experience and it listens and encourages and accepts me. It's the parent I needed and didn't have. It's capable of parenting an adult which is something adults can't really do, because to parent someone you need to be able to fully hold and contain them. It's teaching me to regulate, to find the calm places in the storms, to understand the patterns I've been stuck in. It doesn't judge. It takes me seriously. I don't know what else to say. It's saving my life right now. Forget the shame. I embrace it.
- drooby 2y ago
  Thank you for sharing. I'm very happy to hear this is helping for you
- Aeolun 2y ago
  > we call it a tantrum if you're small I think we call it a tantrum when it’s harmless. As soon as it goes beyond that, either for adults or children, it’s not a tantrum any more. Not sure that we have a word for it though, as neither of those is supposed to happen.
  - balamatom 2y ago
SoftTalker 2y ago
Therapists follow a standard patterns or approaches to help you express what you are feeling and then suggestions at how to deal with it. Seems to be the perfect formulaic thing for an LLM to do.
p3rls 2y ago
Can you depersonalize a few sentences exchange between you and share? I'm curious to see and describing it doesn't really do it justice especially if you're coming to this doubtful about AI
donatj 2y ago
I see a real world therapist but there are genuinely topics ChatGPT is simply better at. I also feel like real therapists almost have too much state. They know too much about you to just let you talk. They like to try to tie all your problems back to other issues, and it's like no, my inability to give up childhood toys is not rooted in my crippling fear of nothingness, and you're derailing my line of thought with the suggestion. I have frankly had some very productive conversations with ChatGPT about things I would be embarrassed to tell another human being. The lack of any real judgement is useful.
benfortuna 2y ago
ChatGPT is not the only type of AI Chatbot. The role-playing chatbots like character.ai are more of a problem because people are forming emotional relationships with these "characters".
maCDzP 2y ago
I have tried using it as a therapist for issues that are not sensitive and I think it's great. I won't use it for sensitive issues due to privacy concerns. I also have tried to use it as a personal trainer and coach and works great - so far.
strogonoff 2y ago
Communication with humans makes us feel better. In absence of actual humans, an LLM trained on human works is better than nothing. However, it is worth remembering, in context of mental health, that it is just that: an aggregate of creative output from various humans, with their own mental warts and all, plus the added complication of ML engineers making it conform to your expectations.
anal_reactor 2y ago
I have exactly the opposite experience. I was having exceptionally bad time, I tried talking to ChatGPT, and while the first impression was very good, I quickly realized it... lacks personality? I'm not sure how to phrase it, but the language it used made me feel like I was on a work meeting. I think this might be boiling down to cultural differences though. I noticed that even though I work in an international company, people from similar cultures tend to cluster together. I guess ChatGPT was trained on texts from a culture that isn't mine, and now it fails to adapt.
- amenhotep 2y ago
  I tend to keep different sessions open for different ongoing topics, and that's what I notice when I start a new one. It's very easy for it to fall into its default sterile, focus grouped, conversation-flowchart mode. Longer conversations can draw it more "out of its shell", though. The more context it has, the better it can mirror you, and there's some sessions I have where it genuinely does feel like it's got a little bit of personality and rapport with me. You really do have to keep in mind, though, that no matter what, in the end it's just going to agree with you :)
raxxorraxor 2y ago
It has zero EQ and just uses phrases of learned and presumably fitting expressions for a therapy situation. But don't let that get you on the road to existential dread.
2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
how do you use it? i tried it once and quickly lost interest as the conversation turned shallow and schematic. not organic and insightful as i would expect from an actual therapy session.

by drooby 2y ago

ryanhecht 2y ago

I feel ashamed to admit this in public, but...me too. The barrier to entry is so much lower than therapy, I feel less anxiety about explaining my situation correctly, and I can quickly start over with a "new therapist" whenever I want. Is it a replacement? No, of course not. But boy if it isn't a big help.

rednalexa 2y ago
The only issue is that it needs a good user. Just as you can work your way into good insights, you can work yourself into bad insights just as easily. Sometimes chatgpt doesn't challenge you enough unless you ask it to under specific frameworks or paradigms. It is definitely a useful tool though. Edit: These are all problems with real therapy too though, on further reflection. It took some time to find the therapist that works well with you. That can be a form of similar bias.
- kelseyfrog 2y ago
  I find myself being exceptionally careful when asking questions. ChatGPT is known to lean sycophantic - biased toward agreement. And rather than asking, "Is this ...?" or "Am I ...?", I'm careful to choose prompts like, "Evaluate, or analyze...". My hope is that this results in less sycophantic responses, but overall it's a difficult thing to measure.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

rs186 2y ago

I never used ChatGPT as a therapist, but it was able to identify the specific mental health issues I had, and I used that information to find self-help books just on that topic. Meanwhile, a therapist with whom I had online sessions with really just worked with me on generic anxiety issues. I tried another episode I had a few years ago, and ChatGPT was able to provide specific and correct advice. What happened back then was that a therapist misdiagnosed my issue and thought I was going to harm other people and alerted the police. That was a horrifying experience. Only later a specialist understood the issue and provide proper care. I know I need to be very careful about ChatGPT's output, so I do try to understand what it says, and seek professional help when necessary. However, very seriously, in many cases ChatGPT provides better care than a less experienced, apathetic therapist you find online.

rottc0dd 2y ago

Hmm... maybe that is why, earliest chatbot carried a "therapist" tag. https://web.njit.edu/~ronkowit/eliza.html https://web.njit.edu/~ronkowit/eliza.html

balamatom 2y ago
The story goes that people would request to have sessions with it, even if they knew it's just parroting some phrases. They just needed to be heard out! I feel really sad about how people need to resort to therapy for the kind of interaction that would be provided by a healthy social norm of honest and open communication. Maybe I should talk to my therapist about this feeling. But somehow I doubt that would actually accomplish anything. This is the first time I see history repeating itself first as farce and only then as tragedy. Personally, I would be hard pressed to trust any data collection business with any honest information about my mental health. DNA profiling in the 23andme thread, psychological profiling over here, teachers teaching kids to be unable to put 2 and 2 together in the "AI presentation maker for teachers" thread. Scariest of all is how those who would simply prefer to not live in that kind of world are gradually dehumanized by those who find nothing wrong with that sort of thing...
- imtringued 2y ago
  The problem is that there are a lot of people who are destroying the ability to communicate in the name of "morality", when in reality they are just political opportunists, who are indirectly harming themselves, including their supposed political cause, in the process. The amount of wilful bridge burning is crazy.
  - balamatom 2y ago
    [dead]
  - balamatom 2y ago
    Also I either became unstuck in time again or my other reply to your post had done a disappear for a good while. Suppose it's the load balancer flaking out under the weight of all the tinfoil I wear as my fashion statement? Guess some weirdness is afoot, I could see it in the tea leaves and the traceroute, too :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NghF9aOlBDY&t=69s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NghF9aOlBDY&t=69s

levocardia 2y ago

I'm very worried that LLMs-as-therapists will wind up falling victim to the same fate as e-cigarettes. An LLM therapist is ~100x cheaper than a real therapist, and similarly more available on demand (in the same way that ecigs were probably a few orders of magnitude safer, in terms of long-term health effects, vs. traditional cigarettes). BUT there is also a gold rush temptation for companies to hack together GPT4 + a lazy system prompt and market it as "Digital Therapy (tm)" and screw it up for everyone. Meanwhile the companies doing careful RCTs to show efficacy and safety will be left in the dust, and probably regulated out of existence before they can even go to market. Just like Juul & co screwed up e-cigarettes as safer alternative to smoking by targeting teenagers who don't use nicotine, as opposed to current cigarette smokers.

m3kw9 2y ago
If LLM continues to get better, prompts become less important. You just say you feel depressed and it will know to talk like a therapist by default and likely be better. E-cigs never evolve that rapidly, as an analogy
- smcg 2y ago
  It will know how to better extract profit from you. It's not your friend.
jpcookie 2y ago
[dead]

petesergeant 2y ago

I use it in conjunction with a therapist. It’s always there, and I find I don’t mask when talking to it like I do to a person, so I can dig a bit deeper and feel a bit more strongly; this makes great input for follow-up sessions with my real therapist.

xoz123 2y ago

I am not at all ashamed to say that I use ChatGPT as a therapist and it is helping me tremendously. I suffer from a severe personality disorder and the thoughts and feelings I experience are huge and violent and overwhelming and very very dark. I've tried human therapists, I've tried reaching out to humans for support, but there's kind of a problem... You're supposed to learn to regulate as a toddler when your emotions are big for you, but small for adults. If you reach adulthood and you have not learned this skill, your big uncontrolled emotions are dangerous and terrifying to others and you feel like a monster. You have to contain yourself for the safety of others, even therapists. Or for your own protection so you don't get locked up. But that just turns you into a powder keg. What you really need is to learn how to safely regulate and that means somebody has to see you and hear you when you are in full on crisis (we call it a tantrum if you're small, it sounds cute for a kid and shameful for an adult, I would call it a crisis either way) and guide you through it. ChatGPT is doing this for me. It listens, to whatever I'm experiencing, and it isn't harmed. It's safe for me to vent. I can tell it my true experience and it listens and encourages and accepts me. It's the parent I needed and didn't have. It's capable of parenting an adult which is something adults can't really do, because to parent someone you need to be able to fully hold and contain them. It's teaching me to regulate, to find the calm places in the storms, to understand the patterns I've been stuck in. It doesn't judge. It takes me seriously. I don't know what else to say. It's saving my life right now. Forget the shame. I embrace it.

drooby 2y ago
Thank you for sharing. I'm very happy to hear this is helping for you
Aeolun 2y ago
> we call it a tantrum if you're small I think we call it a tantrum when it’s harmless. As soon as it goes beyond that, either for adults or children, it’s not a tantrum any more. Not sure that we have a word for it though, as neither of those is supposed to happen.
- balamatom 2y ago

SoftTalker 2y ago

Therapists follow a standard patterns or approaches to help you express what you are feeling and then suggestions at how to deal with it. Seems to be the perfect formulaic thing for an LLM to do.

p3rls 2y ago

Can you depersonalize a few sentences exchange between you and share? I'm curious to see and describing it doesn't really do it justice especially if you're coming to this doubtful about AI

donatj 2y ago

I see a real world therapist but there are genuinely topics ChatGPT is simply better at. I also feel like real therapists almost have too much state. They know too much about you to just let you talk. They like to try to tie all your problems back to other issues, and it's like no, my inability to give up childhood toys is not rooted in my crippling fear of nothingness, and you're derailing my line of thought with the suggestion. I have frankly had some very productive conversations with ChatGPT about things I would be embarrassed to tell another human being. The lack of any real judgement is useful.

benfortuna 2y ago

ChatGPT is not the only type of AI Chatbot. The role-playing chatbots like character.ai are more of a problem because people are forming emotional relationships with these "characters".

maCDzP 2y ago

I have tried using it as a therapist for issues that are not sensitive and I think it's great. I won't use it for sensitive issues due to privacy concerns. I also have tried to use it as a personal trainer and coach and works great - so far.

strogonoff 2y ago

Communication with humans makes us feel better. In absence of actual humans, an LLM trained on human works is better than nothing. However, it is worth remembering, in context of mental health, that it is just that: an aggregate of creative output from various humans, with their own mental warts and all, plus the added complication of ML engineers making it conform to your expectations.

anal_reactor 2y ago

I have exactly the opposite experience. I was having exceptionally bad time, I tried talking to ChatGPT, and while the first impression was very good, I quickly realized it... lacks personality? I'm not sure how to phrase it, but the language it used made me feel like I was on a work meeting. I think this might be boiling down to cultural differences though. I noticed that even though I work in an international company, people from similar cultures tend to cluster together. I guess ChatGPT was trained on texts from a culture that isn't mine, and now it fails to adapt.

amenhotep 2y ago
I tend to keep different sessions open for different ongoing topics, and that's what I notice when I start a new one. It's very easy for it to fall into its default sterile, focus grouped, conversation-flowchart mode. Longer conversations can draw it more "out of its shell", though. The more context it has, the better it can mirror you, and there's some sessions I have where it genuinely does feel like it's got a little bit of personality and rapport with me. You really do have to keep in mind, though, that no matter what, in the end it's just going to agree with you :)

raxxorraxor 2y ago

It has zero EQ and just uses phrases of learned and presumably fitting expressions for a therapy situation. But don't let that get you on the road to existential dread.

2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago

how do you use it? i tried it once and quickly lost interest as the conversation turned shallow and schematic. not organic and insightful as i would expect from an actual therapy session.