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.

This is a great example of the kinds of problems that can crop up.

Fish doesn't realize its swimming in water, kind of thing.

One approach is basically just gaslighting you:

The things that bother you and cause you trouble... well they just shouldn't, and you should be fine with that.

The other approach is.... you know, actually diagnostic, and can lead to... actually useful diagnosis, and thus more specified therapy and potentially other kinds of help.

As an autist, I've gone through many similar situations.

Sex/Gender independent... just 90% of therapists don't get it all. Always try to diagnose me with something else, and its different every time.

Doesn't matter that I've done the full RAADS V test and I'm basically off thr charts autistic, rofl.

Half of them have never even heard of it, don't know anything about how diagnosing or providing help to an autistic person works at all, tend to think all autists are low functioning with very severe, general social deficits.

Then I get stuck on ... well they will rephrsse what I just said, and say/ask it back to me, and I'll say no, no I phrased what I said specifically, because I meant exactly that.

Then I see in their notes later that I am 'arguementative' or 'agitated' or 'aggressive'... far, fsr more often if its a woman psych/soc worker/counselor who I am... not even 'correcting', just trying to not have them put words in my mouth.

Men tend to be less intimidated and more open to my insistance that I meant exactly what I said... and I am talking in the same voice, same mannerisms, same everything, with everyone.

Some women get it, most don't, some men get it, most don't.

... But the field is vastly disproportionately populated with women.

So the end result for a lot of guys is... hey look, another woman that isn't really listening to me.

Well it was men's mental health month. Funny how I just found that out today. But please, let's talk about women's mental health issues.

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.

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

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

I mean, that is basically what maintenance programs are

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.

I thought that was methadone, or did Trainspotting lie to me?

I'd like to thank a childhood of having no friends to offer me any drugs for keeping me away from a lifetime of addiction.

I mean, to a certain degree this is broadly true.

Like we have the numbers, younger generations are waaaay less likely to have had a relationship or sexual encounter by the same age/stage in their life as compared to previous generations, way more people just are relationship inexperienced.

This goes for both genders/sexes, though it is more prominent with younger men than women.

The overwhelming problem is that in the US, so much in person socialization is expensive, basically pay-gated, paywalled.

There are very few third places you can just hang out at for no cost. Public transit sucks or is non existant, cars are super unaffordable due to collapsing economy, and all our cities are designed for using cars to drive from place to place... so very few places are actually walk-navigable...

Everyone is increasingly overweight and overworked (or over homeworked, for students) and overstressed, so they can't or don't engage in group meet up hobbies or sports as much as they used to... and ironically even religiosity levels overall trending down means less people are going to church... all the traditional methods of getting socialization and expanding out a friend network in real life are withering.

So, the easier path is to get your socialization, of all kinds, primarily digitally.

But all those most common and popular ways of doing that are also massively manipulative with algos intentionally feeding you whatever ragebait slop appeals to you, personally.

It is very ironic that, as basically a 90s kid myself, very early tech adopter... my view of the vast majority of social media now is that it is basically a mentally harmful and addictive drug that people need to detox from... but when I tell younger people that, they say things like 'its not that deep bro, everybody has a (whatever) profile'.

There are lots of studies that show that very common levels of social media app usage... do actually reduce attention spans, spread dangerous misinformation, lower academic performance, cause negative self esteem by way of unrealistic standards, of beauty, lifestyle, wealth... brainrot is real, basically.

Like, I am all for the TikTok ban for kids. But also ban all short form video content for kids. Instagram, Youtube shorts, whatever.

This shit is melting peoples brains, it needs to be treated the same way you'd treat a drug epidemic.

We are now at the point where kids give so little of a fuck, have such tiny attention spans and need for constant, rapid fire stimulation... that half of adult Americans read below a 6th grade level, 20-30% of them read below a 2nd grade level, making them functionally illiterate... and thats just with Gen Z now mostly being in those young adult numbers, its gonna be even worse when Gen Alpha graduates and starts trying to enter society/the workforce.

EDIT:

This isn't even broadly unprecedented.

Look at Japan.

Hikkikomori.

The stagnant economy becomes overly financialized and corporatized and impossibly demanding... so people just drop out of it, or worse, kill themselves from the stress of trying to live up to its expectations...

And well then yeah, in person socializing broadly drops, relationship dynamics become strained and morph, birth rate plummets.

Give it 5 or 10 years and we'll have something resembling rent a boyfriend/girlfriend services and maid / stud cafes as well, as the stereotypified fascimile of socialization and having a real relstionship becomes a marketable product, and then industry.

Maybe a few areas will even properly legalize and regulate prostitution.

Granted, that'll be in any areas that remain even kind of blue.

The red areas will just go full theocrat and send you to jail for masturbating, but also re-legalize child marriage, and rework marriage laws into 'covenant marriage', where basically the woman functionally cannot divorce the husband.

In summary: cyberpunk hypercapitalism is in fact very very bad for healthy human relationship dynamics.

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

Well. Not very different from "opening up" to hashish fumes or Tarot cards or Chinese fortune cookies.

And robotic therapists are a common enough component of classical science fiction, not even all dystopian.

For the record, I agree that the results suck. Everything around us is falling apart, have you noticed?

You can do more with less with 1% deadly error rate, and you can do much more with much less with 10% deadly error rate. Military and economic logic says that the latter wins . Which means the latter wins evolution.

And we (that is, our parents and grandparents) have built a nice world intended for low error rates, because they didn't think such a contradiction between efficiency and correctness will happen, or they thought that it's our job to root out our time's weeds, loosely quoting Tolkien, and they have rooted out theirs as well as they could.

Which means that nice world doesn't survive evolution.

I think it's probably more complex than just money.

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.

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'.

‍️

You get what you pay for. Would these same people take cancer treatments from the same LLM?

The best therapist in the world can still end your career by causing your clearance to be revoked or rendering you unqualified for your unit’s mission.

(Suicide is a big problem in the military, I lost a buddy to it.)

The cheapest therapist in the world may still not be covered by your insurance. (And nothing you write in reply will alter that.)

They should work to make AI therapy better while keeping it totally anonymous. If it were really good it would be the number one use for running a local and disconnected and air gapped LLM: perfectly private therapy with no “we just use telemetry to improve our product” bullshit.

Then maybe a lot more men would seek help/talk about their thoughts and feelings.

TBH this is a huge factor.

I don’t use ChatGPT much less use it like it’s a person, but I'm socially isolated at the moment. So I bounce dark internal thoughts off of locally run LLMs.

It’s kinda like looking into a mirror. As long as I know I'm talking to a tool, it’s helpful, sometimes insightful. It’s private. And I sure as shit can’t afford to pay a therapist out of the gazoo for that.

It was one of my previous problems with therapy: payment depending on someone else, at preset times (not when I need it). Many sessions feels like they end when I’m barely scratching the surface. Yes therapy is great in general and for deeper feedback/guidance, but still.

To be clear, I don’t think this is a good solution in general. Tinkering with LLMs is part of my living, I understand the jist of how they work, I tend to use raw completion syntax or even base pretrains.

But most people anthropomorphize them because that’s how chat apps are presented. That’s problematic.

Well. Not very different from "opening up" to hashish fumes or Tarot cards or Chinese fortune cookies.

And robotic therapists are a common enough component of classical science fiction, not even all dystopian.

For the record, I agree that the results suck. Everything around us is falling apart, have you noticed?

You can do more with less with 1% deadly error rate, and you can do much more with much less with 10% deadly error rate. Military and economic logic says that the latter wins . Which means the latter wins evolution.

And we (that is, our parents and grandparents) have built a nice world intended for low error rates, because they didn't think such a contradiction between efficiency and correctness will happen, or they thought that it's our job to root out our time's weeds, loosely quoting Tolkien, and they have rooted out theirs as well as they could.

Which means that nice world doesn't survive evolution.