Skip to content

Men are opening up about mental health to AI instead of humans

Technology
282 118 0
  • And it's awesome. Men aren't allowed by others to show weakness. AI therapy genuinely helps a lot.

    Or it gets them into a negative feedback loop since AI hardly ever tries to contradict you.

    But yeah. At least they're opening up to someone/something.

  • Alternate title "Men so starved of sources of support they resort to talking to AI"

    Edit: have started a new com for men to talk to each other instead of AI /c/reprieve@lemmy.zip

    Or “men would rather talk to superpowered autocorrect rather than sharing their feelings with family and friends”

  • Better than nothing I guess. Obviously it's a privacy nightmare. But therapy is hard to reach nowadays and I've noticed that many men are reluctant to make that step. It'd be preferable if they did, but if ChatGPT can at least give an outlet for the emotions then it might just save a few people. Seeing men demolish themselves because they're too ashamed to seek help is something I've unfortunately seen quite often. Even though I'm aware of this I've still waited till it was way too late because I subconsciously didn't want to give in to the "weakness". I hate that men are conditioned this way, it costs lives.

    @gerryflap @bytesonbike

    many men are reluctant to make that step

    Sometimes it's not the patient to blame. I made the step, countless times since my childhood... I sought help... Result? Got several, diverging diagnostics, several medications that didn't work, until the most recent psychiatrist and psychologist some months ago: the psychiatrist said I got "nothing" (even when I had a fresh cut on my wrist) and the second "struggled to find any complaints from me". So I simply gave up on seeking medical care (and "care" in general, human or whatnot). I don't use AI for therapy because, as a former programmer, I'm deeply aware of their underlying Markov chain and NN algorithms, but sometimes their probabilistic outputs lead me to insights I couldn't get from any living Homo sapiens beings (such as the possibility that I have "Geschwind Syndrome", a condition of which will probably stay undiagnosed).

  • Or “men would rather talk to superpowered autocorrect rather than sharing their feelings with family and friends”

    This response is why men feel scared and uncomfortable opening up. You are a part of the problem. For your male family members' sake, I hope you check in on them instead of just being sexist online.

  • This response is why men feel scared and uncomfortable opening up. You are a part of the problem. For your male family members' sake, I hope you check in on them instead of just being sexist online.

    Men feel scared and uncomfortable because they’re afraid to be told they were wrong to hide their feelings?

  • I mean, I know they fixed it, but LLMs once suggested jumping off a bridge if you searched for help with suicidal ideation

    "Having trouble quitting heroin? A little bit of heroin can really alleviate those cravings!"

  • Men feel scared and uncomfortable because they’re afraid to be told they were wrong to hide their feelings?

    Have you ever considered not being like this?

  • Men feel scared and uncomfortable because they’re afraid to be told they were wrong to hide their feelings?

    If you really honestly don't understand why what you said was horrible I'm willing to have a conversation with you if you want to DM me to talk about it. For starters, men feel scared and uncomfortable because their serious problems will get made light of just like you did. Or told to "man up". Which I imagine was on the tip of your tongue

  • A profound relational revolution is underway, not orchestrated by tech developers but driven by users themselves. Many of the 400 million weekly users of ChatGPT are seeking more than just assistance with emails or information on food safety; they are looking for emotional support.

    “Therapy and companionship” have emerged as two of the most frequent applications for generative AI globally, according to the Harvard Business Review. This trend marks a significant, unplanned pivot in how people interact with technology.

    Have we considered this may be the only time it's actually justifiable to have real people controlling the "AI". Like instead of an underpaid tech worker from the global south answering coding questions, we get therapists to pretend to be AI so men will actually talk to them.

  • that's easy to say, but when someone is in a crisis, I would be wrong to judge then for talking to an AI (shitty terrible solution) instead of a therapist that can be unaffordable and also comes with a risk of then being terrible.

    a terrible therapist at least has an ethics board

    a terrible therapist at least has evidence-based interventions on their side

    a terrible therapist at lest has the fact that ~80% of positive outcomes have nothing to do with the interventions or anything the therapist does besides show up and be cool (a statistic I remember quite well from grad school)

    AI has none of these things

    therapy isn't fucking magic. it's a relationship. you can't have a relationship with an LLM. there's no such thing as AI therapy, you're just training it to tell you about CBT worksheets while you bitch about your problems like you're in a nail salon

  • A profound relational revolution is underway, not orchestrated by tech developers but driven by users themselves. Many of the 400 million weekly users of ChatGPT are seeking more than just assistance with emails or information on food safety; they are looking for emotional support.

    “Therapy and companionship” have emerged as two of the most frequent applications for generative AI globally, according to the Harvard Business Review. This trend marks a significant, unplanned pivot in how people interact with technology.

    What a clickbait. Of course people are picking feee resource with zero friction over 120$ an hour half a day event.

  • Look, if you can afford therapy, really, fantastic for you. But the fact is, it's an extremely expensive luxury, even at poor quality, and sharing or unloading your mental strain with your friends or family, particularly when it is ongoing, is extremely taxing on relationships. Sure, your friends want to be there for you when they can, but it can put a major strain depending on how much support you need. If someone can alleviate that pressure and that stress even a little bit by talking to a machine, it's in extremely poor taste and shortsighted to shame them for it. Yes, they're willfully giving up their privacy, and yes, it's awful that they have to do that, but this isn't like sharing memes... in the hierarchy of needs, getting the pressure of those those pent up feelings out is important enough to possibly be worth the trade-off. Is it ideal? Absolutely not. Would it be better if these systems were anonymized? Absolutely. But humans are natural anthropomorphizers. They develop attachments and build relationships with inanimate objects all the time. And a really good therapist is more a reflection for you to work through things yourself anyway, mostly just guiding your thoughts towards better patterns of thinking. There's no reason the machine can't do that, and while it's not as good as a human, it's a HUGE improvement on average over nothing at all.

    therapy does not have to be expensive.

    around 70% of my caseload is Medicaid and they don't pay a dime. the remainder is mostly DOC (prison), they only pay if we charge No Show fee. so they pay to not go to therapy. There's 1-2 people who are funded by the county. they pay a $7 copay per session

    Therapy isn't expensive, luigi is.

    As far as efficacy, we don't even have data suggesting AI therapy is effective. we have ample data, however, showing that the most important part of therapy is not what you do but the relationship itself. not individual efforts. so your theory about what therapy does for us is wrong. there's no relationship with an LLM. we have no reason to believe it would be any better than a paper journal and a CBT worksheet.

  • Have you ever considered not being like this?

    probably not but that's because sexism against men is normalized and you're not allowed to talk about it unless you're a neonazi for some reason.

    side note, this is exactly why the "young broccoli haired boy to fascist brownshirt" pipeline exists. they have real and genuine issues and instead of getting any sort of community or support virtually every facet of society is telling them their issues are fake and that they are destined to be monsters. then someone like j peterson comes along and tells them "life isn't so bad, it's okay, just clean your room and be disciplined, it'll all start to look up soon champ.. and uh... also hate the gays, black people, and other minorities - they're the woke mob that left you abandoned like this!" people making shocked pikachu face at young men being hardcore MAGAts are so sorely out of touch with what being a man is like and the kinds of trauma that can stem from the male experience. it's obvious to most of us why this issue exists, i hope. this comment chain is a great example. if you even touch the topic you get barraged with people telling you to essentially shut the fuck up and stop entertaining the idea that men are possibly people too and not some root of all fucking evil in the world.

    the amount of literal hate I see towards men in casual discourse is insane. can say the most psychotic shit in most circles nowadays but if you point your malice at the "right kinds" of people most won't even bat an eye. see people frequently talking about doing unhinged shit to others solely because they are a man or [insert other group they don't like generally for some stupid fucking reason] and there is a preconceived slight, danger, or aggression. leftists think they're better people morally but we're really not. i have seen the exact same bullshit bigotry promulgate every community i know of in the past few years. the same brainrot the conservatives have had since the tea partiers has infiltrated our spaces too. everyone genuinely is dumb, angry, and hateful now.

    I am not wholly convinced that our culture being the target of multiple astroturfing campaigns hasn't degraded people's capability for nuance, compassion, empathy, and ontology.

  • yep, if someone disagrees with me, it's usually because they're unhinged. People rarely know things that I don't, because I am very smart. there's no way that anyone downvoted that post because it makes statements that are inconsistent with the current scientific knowledge around this subject, because no such knowledgeable exists. I know this because if it did exist i would know about it, as I'm very smart. my AI therapist told me so. and i see nothing wrong with that post. so anyone who does must be a fool.

  • probably not but that's because sexism against men is normalized and you're not allowed to talk about it unless you're a neonazi for some reason.

    side note, this is exactly why the "young broccoli haired boy to fascist brownshirt" pipeline exists. they have real and genuine issues and instead of getting any sort of community or support virtually every facet of society is telling them their issues are fake and that they are destined to be monsters. then someone like j peterson comes along and tells them "life isn't so bad, it's okay, just clean your room and be disciplined, it'll all start to look up soon champ.. and uh... also hate the gays, black people, and other minorities - they're the woke mob that left you abandoned like this!" people making shocked pikachu face at young men being hardcore MAGAts are so sorely out of touch with what being a man is like and the kinds of trauma that can stem from the male experience. it's obvious to most of us why this issue exists, i hope. this comment chain is a great example. if you even touch the topic you get barraged with people telling you to essentially shut the fuck up and stop entertaining the idea that men are possibly people too and not some root of all fucking evil in the world.

    the amount of literal hate I see towards men in casual discourse is insane. can say the most psychotic shit in most circles nowadays but if you point your malice at the "right kinds" of people most won't even bat an eye. see people frequently talking about doing unhinged shit to others solely because they are a man or [insert other group they don't like generally for some stupid fucking reason] and there is a preconceived slight, danger, or aggression. leftists think they're better people morally but we're really not. i have seen the exact same bullshit bigotry promulgate every community i know of in the past few years. the same brainrot the conservatives have had since the tea partiers has infiltrated our spaces too. everyone genuinely is dumb, angry, and hateful now.

    I am not wholly convinced that our culture being the target of multiple astroturfing campaigns hasn't degraded people's capability for nuance, compassion, empathy, and ontology.

    I'm here to talk if you need an ear man, I understand you and it sounds like you've been through your own personal brand of shit

    Edit: Made a com where you can talk more freely without judgement /c/reprieve@lemmy.zip

  • Or “men would rather talk to superpowered autocorrect rather than sharing their feelings with family and friends”

    yeah they are definitely making dumb choices. it's probably not because they're all just dumb though. they probably have a lot of external factors pushing them towards that decision.

    for example, many discussions tend to find ways to blame and shame them instead of responding with empathy. sort of like this comment. what benefit do you think you get by reframing things to blame the men here?

  • 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.

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

    what the fuck are you talking about? this is objectively incorrect based on current evidence-based practices. why the fuck are you spreading misinfo about my job?

    CBT IS NOT the only arghh omggg you must be trolling me. I'm not wasting any more on this

  • 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.

    because they're tired of being the entire support system for men experiencing a loneliness epidemic.

    I've got no horse in this race but it appears that 'men should not be afraid to open up' articles and tweets were followed by 'men, we are not your therapist'.

    🤷♂

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

    Learning that as an acronym for cock and ball torture before the therapy version makes me laugh every time.

    My experience with women therapists was always about how I just wasn't paying enough attention to other people when I pointed out that the people around me weren't consistent enough to figure out their patterns. My one therapist who was a man explained that most people are just better at handling it when they were wrong and it is fine to be wrong, plus he helped me get diagnosed with ADHD instead of telling me to just try harder. I'll bet there are some therapists who are women who are just as good as he was, but it became pretty clear that social norms are just as hard for people who specialize in behaviors to overcome.

    what makes you think their gender is even relevant to their practice?

  • Also talking to ChatGPT, if done anonymously, won’t ruin your career.

    (Thinking of AD military, where they tell you help is available but in reality it will and maybe should cost you your security clearance.)

  • 11 Stimmen
    10 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    saik0shinigami@lemmy.saik0.comS
    Simply using AI isn't an issue... Allowing it to take over in a way that accelerates the removal of the knowledge from our pools of knowledge is a problem. Allowing companies to use AI as a direct replacement of actual medical professionals will remove knowledge from society. We already know that we can't use AI to fuel more AI learning... the models implode. In order to continue learning more from medicine, we need to keep pushing for human learning and understanding. Funny that you agree with me and apparently see useful discussion to have here... but downvote me even though the comment certainly added to the discussion. Oh, and next time don't put words into someone's mouth, very much a bad faith action that harms meaningful discussion. I never said we should ban it or never use it. A better answer would be to legislate that doctors must still oversee, or must be the approving authority. That AI can never have a final say in someone's care and that research must never be sourced from AI sources. All I said, is that if we continue what we're doing and rely on AI in any meaningful capacity, we will run into problems. Especially in the context of the comment I responded to which opined upon corporation controlled AI. FFS... they can't even run a vending machine. https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1 Oh.. and actually I would consider the 85% that it gets to be pretty poor considering that the AI was likely trained on the full breadth of NEJM information. Doctors don't have that ability to retain and train on 100% of all knowledge of the NEJM, so mistaking things makes sense for them. It doesn't make sense for something that was trained on NEJM data to screw up on an NEJM case. My stance is the same for all AI. I'll use it to generate basic code for me. I'll never run that without review. Or to jumpstart research into a topic... and validate the information presented with outside direct sources. TL;DR: Tool is good... Source is bad.
  • Pirate Software "Stop Killing Games" Drama

    Technology technology
    9
    37 Stimmen
    9 Beiträge
    4 Aufrufe
    V
    Crazy how big of a following he has after the drama with Only Fangs at the beginning of he year.
  • Queer Dating Apps: Beware Who You Trust With Your Intimate Data

    Technology technology
    1
    1
    72 Stimmen
    1 Beiträge
    5 Aufrufe
    Niemand hat geantwortet
  • 88 Stimmen
    21 Beiträge
    22 Aufrufe
    J
    The self hosted model has hard coded censored content.
  • 48 Stimmen
    5 Beiträge
    9 Aufrufe
    L
    Arguably we should be imposing 25% DST on digital products to counter the 25% tariff on aluminium and steel and then 10% on everything else. The US started it by imposing blanket tariffs in spite of our free trade agreement.
  • 278 Stimmen
    100 Beiträge
    22 Aufrufe
    F
    It's not just skills, it's also capital investment.
  • 0 Stimmen
    4 Beiträge
    2 Aufrufe
    K
    Only way I'll want a different phone brand is if it comes with ZERO bloatware and has an excellent internal memory/storage cleanse that has nothing to do with Google's Files or a random app I'm not sure I can trust without paying or rooting. So far my A series phones do what I need mostly and in my opinion is superior to the Motorola's my fiancé prefers minus the phone-phone charge ability his has, everything else I'm just glad I have enough control to tweak things to my liking, however these days Samsungs seem to be infested with Google bloatware and apps that insist on opening themselves back up regardless of the widespread battery restrictions I've assigned (even was sent a "Stop Closing my Apps" notif that sent me to an article ) short of Disabling many unnecessary apps bc fully rooting my devices is something I rarely do anymore. I have a random Chinese brand tablet where I actually have more control over the apps than either of my A series phones whee Force Stopping STAYS that way when I tell them to! I hate being listened to for ads and the unwanted draining my battery life and data (I live off-grid and pay data rates because "Unlimited" is some throttled BS) so my ability to control what's going on in the background matters a lot to me, enough that I'm anti Meta-apps and avoid all non-essential Google apps. I can't afford topline phones and the largest data plan, so I work with what I can afford and I'm sad refurbished A lines seem to be getting more expensive while giving away my control to companies. Last A line I bought that was supposed to be my first 5G phone was network locked, so I got ripped off, but it still serves me well in off-grid life. Only app that actually regularly malfunctions when I Force Stop it's background presence is Roku, which I find to have very an almost insidious presence in our lives. Google Play, Chrome, and Spotify never acts incompetent in any way no matter how I have to open the setting every single time I turn Airplane Mode off. Don't need Gmail with Chrome and DuckDuckGo has been awesome at intercepting self-loading ads. I hope one day DDG gets better bc Google seems to be terrible lately and I even caught their AI contradicting itself when asking about if Homo Florensis is considered Human (yes) and then asked the oldest age of human remains, and was fed the outdated narrative of 300,000 years versus 700,000+ years bipedal pre-humans have been carbon dated outside of the Cradle of Humanity in South Africa. SO sorry to go off-topic, but I've got a big gripe with Samsung's partnership with Google, especially considering the launch of Quantum Computed AI that is still being fine-tuned with company-approved censorships.
  • How I use Mastodon in 2025 - fredrocha.net

    Technology technology
    11
    1
    0 Stimmen
    11 Beiträge
    8 Aufrufe
    J
    Sure. Efficiency isn't everything, though. At the end of the article there are a few people to get you started. Then you can go to your favorites in that list, and follow some of the people THEY are following. Rinse and repeat, follow boosted folks. You'll have 100 souls in no time.