Comment by sonofhans
8 days ago
Your understanding is wrong. What you’re describing is executive coaching — useful advice for already high-functioning people.
Ask a real practitioner and they’ll tell you most real therapy is exactly the thing you dismiss as a trick: human connection.
No, what they're describing is manualized CBT. We have abundant evidence that there is little or no difference in outcomes between therapy delivered by a "real practitioner" and basic CBT delivered by a nurse or social worker with very basic training, or even an app.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23252357/
Yeah, my issue is that I suspect an LLM based app may be easily "jailbroken" (since they tend to be highly agreeable due to their training) and turned into an enabler rather than a helper.
Even if some LLM therapists are good, with zero friction to go "doctor shopping" will result in a great many patients picking the bad ones that make them feel better, rather than the good ones that make them do better.
Where by “real practitioner” you mean “human being” which is my point entirely, thus we agree.