I go to a therapist and she treats me like a five year old.

I can literally just read her basic CBT training online, its not hard to find.

Then I do the excercises at home.

CBT being basically the only kind of approach to therapy that is actually empirically shown to reliably actually help most people.

Oh, you're seeking an therapist qualified and specialized for high functioning autists?

There aren't any in the state anymore.

...

I also think that using ChatGPT as a therapist is a fucking horrible idea, but uh, therapy in America is expensive, and often shit quality, oh and they just hand out pills that you'll become dependent on, willy nilly, as opposed to trying everything else first and using that as a last resort.

I go to a therapist and she treats me like a five year old.

I can literally just read her basic CBT training online, its not hard to find.

Then I do the excercises at home.

CBT being basically the only kind of approach to therapy that is actually empirically shown to reliably actually help most people.

Oh, you're seeking an therapist qualified and specialized for high functioning autists?

There aren't any in the state anymore.

...

I also think that using ChatGPT as a therapist is a fucking horrible idea, but uh, therapy in America is expensive, and often shit quality, oh and they just hand out pills that you'll become dependent on, willy nilly, as opposed to trying everything else first and using that as a last resort.

I go to a therapist and she treats me like a five year old.

I can literally just read her basic CBT training online, its not hard to find.

Then I do the excercises at home.

CBT being basically the only kind of approach to therapy that is actually empirically shown to reliably actually help most people.

Oh, you're seeking an therapist qualified and specialized for high functioning autists?

There aren't any in the state anymore.

...

I also think that using ChatGPT as a therapist is a fucking horrible idea, but uh, therapy in America is expensive, and often shit quality, oh and they just hand out pills that you'll become dependent on, willy nilly, as opposed to trying everything else first and using that as a last resort.

There are other methods that are clinically valid beyond CBT. Don’t give up. Somatic approaches that bypass the prefrontal cortex can be really effective too. The new hotness is showing that all that word-making can get in the way as much as it helps.

If that interests you, search ‘top-down bottom-up’ therapy approaches.

Yeah, but also one of them is helpful and the other is the exact opposite. If the choices are AI therapist or no therapist, you are still better off with no therapist.

It's stupid as hell to share any personal information with a company that is interested in spying on you and feeding your data to the nearest advertiser they can find.

Like seriously -- are people using their brains or what?

Oh I mean, I'm honestly fine.

Had some real bad PTSD style flashback shit for a while, from being homeless for roughly 2 years, still jump at sudden noises and lights, but I've been that way forever, yay for abusive family growing up...

But I only recently did a full check in with all kinds of medical specialists to reorient after I finally stopped being homeless, found a shithole that ain't too shitty, that I can afford to rent... literally, I just wanted a paper copy of the CBT procedures, because they've worked well, honestly very well for me in the past...

And I now have numerous physical injuries from being homeless so long, getting the shit kicked out of me every other week, getting my shit stolen every other day, almost dying from now both a blizzard and a heat wave... SSDI needs you to actually have current medical contacts so they can pull records from them... and I had to get as much of my old MyChart files back together, I don't even remember how many phones I had that kept getting stolen, email accounts I lost access to.

I appreciate the suggestion, but I seriously have never been as mentally free of stress as I am now:

All I gotta do is focus on PT, then try to either get back to a job or start my own software freelancing gig... maybe make a video game... just gotta heal up my wrist and leg and back and ass a bit more, so I can actually sit and type at a 'puter for more than 15 minutes at a time w/o terrible pain.

I honestly love being a hermit, away from my abusive family... I'm not lonely at all, I love the solitude, lemmy is really 95% of what I need for social interactions and excercising my own brain, and of course every once in a while, I hobble with my cane down and chit chat with a neighbor or two.

Basically, nearly everyone in my life I've ever trusted or loved has abused or manipulated me in some way... not literally all, of course, but the vast, vast majority... so fuck em.

Im happier off without em, and I now literally know that I can keep myself alive in the absolute worst possible situation... but, I'm still 95% immobile, don't have a car anymore, that got stolen, so its not like I could meet people and have a real social life anyway.

Gotta heal the body first, literally get back on my feet. Been fixing up my financial situation best I can while I'm mostly bed ridden.

PTSD attacks and night terrors ... and that instant jump to 'ready to defend myself with potentially lethal force'... yeah, that's dissapated significantly with the CBT excercises, and simply having my own, controlled environment, with relatively little external responsibilities... just took time.

In my experience, it's likely that some of those downvotes come from reflexive "AI bad! How dare you say AI good!" Reactions, not anything specific to mental health. For a community called "technology" there's a pretty strong anti-AI bubble going on here.

Yeah! Great to hear. Please continue to be a fixture in your neighborhood.

As Fred Rogers told me once, in a conversation that was just between us, a friend is a person in your neighborhood.

There are other causes here.

They've been talking for a while about how the low participation in dating by Gen Z women is because they're tired of being the entire support system for men experiencing a loneliness epidemic.

It's a lot of pressure for the women to be under, and so they're withdrawing.

I'm guessing this is one of the driving forces as well. Lack of real, emotionally intimate human connections around them. Many men are quite fucked in that regard right now.

they need therapy, obviously they need help, and blaming them for not doing the most reasonable thing that might be unaffordable is even stupider.

blame predatory AI, openai could in a single afternoon make it so Chatgpt recomends or even helps you find a local therapist, instead of enabling this for profit.

That's what I'm doing. That and screaming into a pillow most nights.

Do they need therapy? Or do they need a world they can actually fucking live in?

It's not like either one is available to them.

genAI chatbots are so predatory

for me, beer with friends solves it

LLMs have no intentions. They only do what the user asks them to.

are people using their brains or what?

What? No. Seriously, are you new here? And by here I mean Earth.

I see idiots all around me. Everybody only interested in advancing themselves. But if we advanced the group, it would be better for EVERYBODY.

But we as a species are too stupid to build a society that benefits everybody.

So no. No brain use here.

The flip side of that is vast numbers of Gen Z Men saying many Gen Z women are basically misandrists, who asked them to stop interacting with them unprompted, no more unwanted attention... so they did that, they stopped... and now all they see is IG and TikToks of Gen Z Women complaining that no one asks them out on dates anymore, no one is 6' tall with a 6 figure income becore the age of 30, and willing to worship them as a queen.

I am not saying this is any kind of objectively accurate to whatever degree, but I am saying that this is the very common, general vibe.

So, in that situation: Why bother?

Many men can actually be fulfilled just staying actually single, as in not even dating single, snd getting their own lives, finances, health, to a better place.

Yes this does though also mean that ... because we've just got less general, face to face socialization going on that... basically a larger than otherwise number of them will basically develop harmful, reinforcing neuroses, in harmful echo chambers... but at the same time, that applies to women as well.

This is what happens when you jam a broad economic collapse up alongside a highly digital and publicized modern media landscape that is tweaked all to fuck to highlight and push the most extreme version of everything... along with extremely mixed messaging that an only digitally socialized person recieves, but all as a firehose, that is very hard to make true sense of.

So... fuck this shit I'm out... social withdrawal... basically becomes a reasonable mental health improving move, even if it does leave you kinda socially stunted as compared to pre-internet generations.