Comment by password54321
18 hours ago
>Damn, we hardly know who our users are
No, they know who you are. 1 in 3 already use AI for mental health advice among many other things.
18 hours ago
>Damn, we hardly know who our users are
No, they know who you are. 1 in 3 already use AI for mental health advice among many other things.
I would say misuse AI for mental health advice. It's already difficult to find good mental health professionals.
Unless you have Bill Gates money, you don't have access to a mental health professional (much less your mental health professional who knows your life situation) when a girlfriend dumps you over text at 1AM. And that's when you may need one most.
People want to talk to their therapist after an argument with their husband or when their boss fires them, not Friday after next.
Decent therapists advocate for cultivating resilience for such situations.
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>> Unless you have Bill Gates money, you don't have access to a mental health professional
I'm not sure where you live. I know almost all colleges in the US have walk in free mental health counseling, along with free telesupport. My company has onsite mental health professionals who you can talk to or call at any time. There are free mental health clinics all over my city. There's mental health professionals who did daily outreach with the homeless and addicts in our city.
This doesn't even start to list all of the available apps you can download from your health care provider for free resources that are available to you.
This might have been true 30-40 years ago, but even over the last decade during and after covid, healthcare providers have put a huge emphasis on mental health and counseling to give people an abundance of resources to help them - when they need help, not in four days when someone is available.
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I do not have Bill Gates money but I think you're describing a friend more than a therapist. Finding anyone awake at 1AM is going to be hard, but even for Linus Torvald money you can find a therapist who will take a quick call in the morning.
In the olden days in these and other situations, you hit the bar, got shitfaced, told your lifes story to a bottle and maybe banged a geezer/cougar that happened to be there. Something like that.
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The need is not in question, the solution is. This annoying glaze machine is not it for mental health tasks.
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Exactly why people turn to AI, which I think is good enough for "casual" mental health advice (the kind people can do themselves by reading self-help books or talking with empathic friends). Arguably it's safer than talking to strangers online because now that they've been doing it for a few years, they will (or should) have plenty of safeguards, unlike people on the internet who can talk out of their ass (like me!) and give bad advice. In theory the LLM will escalate or recommend professional help if they're out of their depth.
>In theory the LLM will escalate or recommend professional help if they're out of their depth.
Given there have been multiple suicides driven by LLMs. I really doubt that.
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> In theory the LLM will escalate or recommend professional help if they're out of their depth.
LLMs can barely identify gaps in their own software designs, and they are provably good at making software.
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In practice we know that LLMs have aided in suicide, so what they should do in theory doesn't matter.
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Those two sentences seem to be a non-sequitor. Unavailability is one reason people would turn to AI. Ease of access is another.
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I've yet to find anybody in mental health profession who is "good", aside psychiatrists and their drug prescriptions. And that's only cause of gatekeeping drugs, not because they're good either.
The worst problem with mental health care is that there is no "you're better" metric. There is if your bone breaks and heal. There is for surgery of various things. But mental health seems to follow Parkinson's Law, and expands to the number of sessions available, whether it helps or not. And at X00$/session, yeah gets costly quick.
So if something trained on all psychiatric literature costs $20/month subscription, that's a substitute therapist. Whether it's clinically trained or not.
I’ve seen about 8 therapists and 3 coaches at various times in the last 15 years. 5-6/8 and 2/3 respectively were, I eventually realized, mostly in it for the money and didn’t actually care too much (if at all) about me making any positive changes permanent. It wasn’t all bad; having someone confidential to talk to is in itself valuable, but the cost/benefit ratio is not at all consistent.
With that kind of benchmark comparison, it’s not all that hard for AI to present some kind of favorable value proposition, even if also inconsistent but with a harder ceiling on the upside.