Maybe short term and in a ultracapitalist society. But entrusting your most inner fears and hurtings to a company is not GDPR compliant, even less so with the more caring social economies.

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.

Naturally. We were beaten up and ostracized if we showed weakness when we were kids. You CAN'T be sharing your feelings like that to another human.

That’s interesting… had never seen it put that way before…

It’s almost like telling men that it’s okay to show your feelings is bullshit lol

Tbh, yeah. I'm a woman with an inoperable brain tumor, and I can completely understand why people would be reluctant to accept "nothing to be done" as a real answer.

If I thought I deserved to live, I'd probably talk to a LLM about it because this topic drags everybody down, and my therapist only sees me once a week. Though, I've heard its good for helping people not live, so maybe its worth a shot after all.

They can’t make it better… you can’t have a relationship with an autocorrect

I also play with llms for a living. I use ChatGPT for therapy and to process emotions. I also see a therapist. ChatGPT is there on my time table and at the time I'm trying to process or learn or just have some fun to see where the limits of the model are. I don't have to wait for a random time slot in 4 days where the thoughts get clouded by time.

I know ChatGPT isn't real and it can be dangerous as it always looks to normalize and support your point of view. But sometimes people need an outlet that's not my waifu pillow.

Therapy in real life takes time, effort, you have to build rappprt. You have to find a therapist that meshes well with you; it's really like dating and finding a matching partner. Many people will take months/years before they're willing to open up fully to a therapist... Where in 2 minutes they'll tell ChatGPT their darkest thoughts and closest held secrets. It's different.

It survives if it pays the price

Yeah, but it is way worse in men with the way they are socialized. Men are taught to not show emotions which results in them being worse at regulating emotions and not talking about issues with their peers since that would be seen as emasculating.

Women on the other hand are taught to discuss their emotions with their peers and to help others with that as well. And now that women are not required to be in a relationship with a man to be able to thrive in society, many men lose out on their only emotional caretaker and turn to chat bots.

a lot of therapists and psychs are also useless for helping men. because they are women and they are basically only trained to deal with women's issues and only see women's emotional processes and processing as 'valid'. there is this default bias that men's emotional processing is 'flawed'.

imo with mental health professionals all my 'issues' were blow way out of proportion. i only had one therapist who actaully helped me was a man and that person helped me understand that 'not everything is your fault'. when all the other therapists/friends/family always 100% told me everything that happens to me is entirely my fault. they also told me it was normal/healthy to vent my feelings by doing productive things (like writing, exercising, relaxing), rather than viewing that as 'not addressing the problem'.

the issue with so much of this crap is that not only does nobody want to talk to men, it's that they don't want to listen and/or the tell us we are 'talking wrong'. even when we do talk to people, there is only a tiny window of acceptable things we an talk about and way we can talk about them or how selfish it is of him to vent/indulge his legitimate emotions.

a woman can burst into tears over any little thing and everyone wants to help her. a man bursts into tears over his father dying of cancer and all the sudden everyone wants to tell him his reaction is too intense and he should be thinking of how he is making other people feel.

Pretty much every guy has had someone in his life try to get him to 'open up' and then we he does he's met with nothing but hostility, disappointment, and eventually rejection. We are told to shut up and never talk about it again. Never, ever is he met with acceptance or love.

young people feeling depressed and isolated is the least of your problems.

Children are the future of EVERY country. The future is looking bleak for young people in the US. Where do you live? Are young people unaffected by social media or what?

Out here in actual civilization though, tik tok youth drama is not representative of reality whatsoever.

That's the thing though. It's hard for me to wrap my head around sometimes, but for lots of young people, social media IS their reality. This became even more true during the pandemic. We asked young people to go to school on a screen and pretend it was the same as doing it in person. Why wouldn't they have the same mindset about chatting, hanging out, flirting, dating, etc.? They don't see it as simulated socializing, it's just how they socialize.

The amount of sexism in this comment section is…unnerving. Does a community exist for male identifying people to talk and share their troubles in a non hostile space? If it doesn’t I’ll make one.

No. Because if it it did it would be shut down as being hostile and offensive to women and a space for proto-rapists to hang out.

Probably the closest space any guy could get is AA or NA meetings.

Too bad for them I made one

they're checking their own understanding by giving you an opportunity to correct them. by rephrasing it identically, it doesnt build any new understanding.

Yes, I understand the purpose of doing that... but they will rephrase it with different words, different meanings, leave out qualifiers, or add in qualifiers, etc.

Many times, the rephrasing doesn't change the meaning, and I agree, no problem.

But sometimes, specific wording or phrasing matters greatly.

I've found this is a concept many neurotypicals generally struggle with, that you can't always just reform a sentence into something easier to parse... because that can lose complexity and precision, and I am trying to convey something complex and precise.

And more often, when I object to my words being reformed... it is women who view my objection as aggressive, agitated, rude, hostile, combatative, etc.

does it not matter to you to be understood by others?

Broadly, I am well understood by most of the people I interact with.

Other than people clumsily trying to psychoanalyze me, and manipulative sociopath/narcissist types.

So no, I do not generally worry about my communication skills, as I have no problem communicating with the vast majority of people.

...

For instance... I am aware that I am often rather verbose, and tend to ramble... thats actually a sign that I feel comfortable, and trust whoever I am talking to.

I am also aware that this can be verbally, conversationally overwhelming with people who think it is rude to interrupt.

So I just tell people, hey, i have a tendency to ramble, I will not be offended at all if you interject and politely tell me to shut it, refocus, try to summarize, etc, when I am obviously rambling to tangential topics, or just telling a long story or something.

And this works very well with people who can gather the... courage? to do this, as I genuinely do not find it offensive.

But with people who are for whatever reason so timid that even after I've given them explicit permission to interrupt me... they still don't actually do it... well, they tend to be frustrated with me, overwhelmed.

Normally, thats fine, I don't need to be everyone's friend.

But when its someone who I basically have little or no choice but to communicate with that particulsr person... yes, this can lead to problems.

maybe that's why you're bashing therapy on the internet, asking for CBT worksheets instead of building rapport, and indirectly praising relationships with LLMs?

So for starters, I quite explicitly said that I think using LLMs for therapy is a 'fucking horrible idea', I just didn't expand on that as much... as to me this is fairly self evident and obvious.

So we now see that you are... doing the thing.

You are putting words in my mouth, because what I specifically said was evidently too complex for you to fully parse, and now you've reformulated it into a bastardized form that is actually contradictory to what I said.

Your poor reading comprehension skills are not my problem.

...

Secondly... I am not bashing therapy broadly, I think it is a great concept when well executed and easily accessible.

CBT in particular is more than just a set of paperwork... it is often very helpful to have a therapist use CBT methods, guidr someone through it in person.

I have been to a good number of therapists who've used CBT methods and they have been quite helpful... I am trying to say that I just needed a refresher, a paper copy, and after that, its been like getting back on a bicycle, I remember my training, lol.

...

Also as far as building rapport: I don't really care to, as I am currently in a relatively temporary living situation, month to month rent, and I fully plan on moving to somewhere with more robust social safety nets and a better mental health support system, public transit system, etc, as soon as I am able, as soon as my PT has been effective enough that I am cleared by my PT team.

As I already mentioned... there are literally no therapists in the state I am currently in, via the health insurancd I can even barely afford... that are qualified and specialized to help an adult with autism.

Not sure where you are, but in the US broadly, there are hardly any psychologists or therapists that are properly qualified to treat high functioning adults with autism.

They are rare, expensive, and have huge waitlists.

I'm in a quite poor red state at the moment, with no highly reputable schools or psychology departments.

Here, autism = you're retarded, and its only ever evaluated as a 'disability' affecting children.

... So my plan is to try to get to where some actual civilization and professionals exist, and to the greatest extent possible, avoid useless or harmful advice from overconfident and untrained specialists who have to pull out the DSM V to understand a reference I am making.

Seems rational to me?

This is pretty sexist.

Coping skills are not gender specific. How they help is different for each individual.

Women have their emotions unsupported just as much as men I know my mom didn't have anyone caring about how she felt. Pretty sure that's the stereotype of most American moms, they work all day come home cook and clean too.

I've never seen a man cry and be told to stop by anyone other than their own father. I've seen countless women be mocked for being emotional.

Sorry bro your comment is far too one sided to be taken seriously by me. Society is hard on everyone.

ChatGPT (last time I tried it) is extremely sycophantic though. Its high default sampling also leads to totally unexpected/random turns.

Google Gemini is now too.

And they log and use your dark thoughts.

I find that less sycophantic LLMs are way more helpful. Hence I bounce between Nemotron 49B and a few 24B-32B finetunes (or task vectors for Gemma) and find them way more helpful.

…I guess what I’m saying is people should turn towards more specialized and “openly thinking” free tools, not something generic, corporate, and purposely overpleasing like ChatGPT or most default instruct tunes.

Sorta agree. Men only spaces make me, a dude, uncomfortable because y'all are weird about women

Therapy is just littered with bad therapists, that do more harm than good and give the practice a bad name.

For every 1 good therapist, there are probably 10+ bad ones.

It can be a fucking ordeal to navigate, financially and emotionally, to try and find the one good one.

My worst experience was a therapist which charged me 300 dollars a session to do nothing but talk about how amazing they were, and that I need to just suck it up and be amazing like they are, afterall, it was so easy for them.

This comment section is nuts.

Men #1 issue is lack of empathy, TOWARDS women. Not each other.

There's your solution.

You can use rethoric and anecdotes all you want but at the end of the day (literally) all you need to do is look out the window and see how many people are out socializing and fucking each other like rabbits.

Those Tik Tok girls complaining about men do so because they are outliers who can't get attention IRL. Simple as.