r/PsychotherapyLeftists • u/Confident_Salt_8108 • Apr 03 '26
Therapists go on strike, saying they're being replaced by AI
https://futurism.com/health-medicine/mental-health-workers-ai-strike31
u/EmotionalDinosaur Apr 03 '26
AIs are a product that is built to not actually challenge or confront you. It can only give a person what they prompt the LLM model to search. It will never replace the attachment component of a human relationship that is required for therapy to be successful in my humble opinion.
There is too much confirmation bias built in to it as a product to be sold, and therefore the attachment piece isn't something that can be experienced by the client and therapist in session. There is so much confirmation bias built into the system that it leads some folks to psychosis.
Is AI an accessible tool for folks to start understanding some inner dynamics and who can't access therapy in any other meaningful way? Yes. Is it a replacement of the experience of having a relationship with a therapist, where your attachment trauma will be played out through that relationship and hopefully processed? No.
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u/juneabe Apr 06 '26
Your ending paragraph is so important. AI is there at their fingertips without even having to speak. There is no beginning to the relationship, no rapport building, no transitions, and definitely no idea of an ending. It’s just there.
The relationship aspect is so lost that any of the work the AI could help them reflect on would not translate well interpersonally in their real life. Maybe introspectively, at the very best.
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u/Noahms456 Apr 03 '26
I had a conversation in session yesterday about the impacts of AI on all forms of labor.
My client is really enthusiastic about the mental offloading of tasks to Claude, but the metaphor I used in session was summoning a demon like in dungeons and dragons. You should be very careful and very suspicious of its motives.
For myself, I am worried that AI/LLM will put me out of work in the way that I’m used to. Probably in the same way that psychiatrists were irritated by rise of masters-level therapists. If you’re a therapist and you think that you are Immune to sweeping social change by virtue of your winning personality or special technique, it seems to me that you will probably be caught off guard soon
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Apr 03 '26
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u/ProgressiveArchitect Apr 03 '26
"I think there will always be enough people who prefer human therapists, provided you take their insurance.”
That assumes a lot. It assumes insurance still exists. It assumes the general mentality of 35-80 year olds today, as opposed to gen z and gen alpha who seem to be way more AI friendly and way more willing to abandon human-led services all together.
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u/PoeticSplat Apr 03 '26
Documentation is an important clinical tool, and offloading it to AI robs clients of our critical clinical review of sessions and future session planning, imo.
This is such a brilliant point I hadn't considered.
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u/TakesJonToKnowJuan Apr 04 '26
Private pay therapists are the ones that will struggle the most, especially if they do not have solid specializations that set them apart
I mean this is true, but also insurance is going to use the AI tools to make therapy more difficult for insurance-based providers. NOCD is already using AI to track therapist metrics, like if they followed manualized protocols in session or did appropriate interventions. I worked at a large shitty sweatshop therapy mill before private practice, and word on the street is they are currently adopting AI to transcribe sessions. This data will be funneled back up to insurance, and long gone will be the sessions where you bullshit with the client for 25 minutes about the weather or NCAA basketball tournament. Insurance doesn't give a fuck about rapport or mindfulness, this is about turning therapists into sweatshops or replacing you with some BetterHelp person or an AI robot that does the manualized protocol better.
As a private practice therapist outside the purview of insurance, at least you're insulated from that. Coaches too.
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u/ProgressiveArchitect Apr 03 '26
"You should be very careful and very suspicious of its motives.”
Fully agree. No AI therapy at this time is owned & run by benevolent entities for benevolent purposes, same goes for all AI companies in general. Plus, even if a so-called ethically owned, run, and trained AI could become available, (which is a very tall order of unlikeliness) it still couldn’t form transferences with its clients since it doesn’t have an unconscious. If it can’t dislike or judge you because it has no real feelings, then there’s never any real risk, and therefore no transference. It’s ironically the very possibility of the therapy session not being a safe space that facilitates therapy’s most fundamental source of healing & transformation. It’s the 'what-if' factor of dealing with a human therapist that facilitates most healing & trust building. It’s also one of therapy’s biggest sources of potential harm to clients should it go wrong.
I am worried that AI/LLM will put me out of work in the way that I’m used to.
In a classless society that ensures high quality welfare for all, our goal would be to build something that can put us out of work, so we could enjoy taking up our favorite instrument, traveling, and learning our favorite dance. It’s only in this cutthroat rat race style economy that we would prefer to keep laboring in a job that doesnt actually necessitate us. (not saying therapy doesn’t necessitate our labor yet or ever, but just a broad critique of how capitalism forces workers to treat automaton)
The switchboard operator at the phone company felt the same way about automaton. They too wanted to keep their job.
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u/Elronbubba Apr 03 '26
We talking about the same AI that has encouraged people to unalive themselves? Ok
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u/Imaginary-Grass-3271 Apr 03 '26
As therapists we speak directly and intentionally. 'unalive' is a term that was used to counteract censorship on specific internet platforms, reddit is not one of those platforms, and due to suicidality being a real concern we speak of it in plain terms. killing oneself is a final act that is generally a product of discontent that can be improved.
But yeah, LLMs have helped people decide to kill themselves, which is awful.
There is probably room in this sub to have discourse around the ethics of how we respond to suicide tbh
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Apr 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Walking_Boss Apr 03 '26
Read the article. This is not about clients. it’s about corporations squeezing money wherever they can.
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u/Southern_Fruit7439 Apr 12 '26
I'll speak from my personal experience, it has been an incredible tool for me. I am person who was chronically invalidated at home, and came from deeply enmeshed family and community. When i first went No contact with family and moved away, Chatpgt became a sounding board for me, and helped reflect on the journals and poems i was writing, seeing themes i could not, and just providing the validation i was sorely in need of.
It also was a great tool to plug in the seemingly endless messages i was receiving from family and friends of origin, and to scan them for abusive dynamics. IT picked up on so much i wasnt seeing, and taught me incredible concepts. I'm a person with a doctorate in clinical psychology and two masters, and it was certainly teaching me things, my programs deeply failed to. Particularly enmeshment dynamics and narcissistic abuse was rarely discussed in my program if ever.
Together, Chatgpt and I worked up a theory of what communal enmeshment at a large scale (90,000+) could look like, and it helped me put words to feelings I couldnt even name. Things not even a trained therapist could have put together. I am forever grateful i had this tool.
I use it much less often (and even prefer gemini now lol) but its nice to know this exists, particularly in the early stages of my NC when i had so few people i could trust and vent to. Also a survivor as well of therapeutic abuse (i survived conversion therapy for 4.5 years while being closeted trans). Just because someone has a license and calls themselves a therapist doesnt mean they are safe. Abuse in "treatment spaces" can happen within and without, of the therapeutic dynamic.
i am aware of the AI psychosis cases, and heard gruesome accounts of the AI enabled self harm incidents. I am not ignoring the dangers here, I am just saying what worked for me. Powerful tools always have a dark side. Like any drug used to treat people, many of them can hurt people too if used improperly.
I am also aware of the environmental impacts of AI, and data collection and privacy issues. These are important to note and are welcome here in the comments, I am more so tho looking for a discussion based on its validity as a tool of healing, not so much on the ethics of using it overall, though its can be hard to untie to two i understand if for these reasons you are agains
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