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

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  • I expected you to mean people exhibiting toxicity and not reporting about it. I was surprised because the comments seemed civil at large. Thank you.

    yeah id say it’s not overt, but that’s kinda the problem… it’s almost difficult to identify, so when it comes to mental health for men a lot of the time society, therapists, etc almost gaslights us into thinking our problems aren’t problems

    if it were overt it’d be easy to identify… the fact what it’s not, the fact that men are the majority, and are the problem in a lot of cases pushes people to certain conclusions (including ourselves about our own problems)

    mental health is complex af

  • Dude is nongendered everyone is a dude, nice try tho trying to pull this though

    I don't agree

  • Another aussie here, Headspace is great too

    yup! and absolutely worth the mention that if you’re queer (qlife), struggling with specific issues - alcohol, gambling, finance, eating disorders, etc - there’s specific support available to a lot of people in australia, the US, europe, etc

    if you need help, help is available! find one of these services who can help you find the specific support that you need, and go from there 🙂

    as a gay man, i found a lot more help when i started seeing services that specialised in queer health 🙂

    yall deserve someone who understands what you’re going through in life

  • 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.

    Of course men will go to an AI for their problems, they can't fathom going to a woman for honest advice.

    And as a result, they gaslight themselves with a worse version of ELIZA.

  • But keep screaming that anything that disagrees with your particular narrative that women are great and perpetual victims of men and men are always bad, I guess?

    Incel talk

    read the whole comment

  • Amen.

    There is a boatload of bad therapists and bad therapy out there. And sadly it gets a lot more traction and popularity because well... it's simplistic and easy. It's the fast food of therapy.

    Good therapy is hard and long and complex. And most people simple don't want to deal with that. They want the diet pill version of therapy. Just make the bad feelings go away, and give me more good feelings.

    I don't think enough analogies are drawn between physical vs mental health. Anyone knows that legit physical health is a long and boring process that takes a lot of discipline and time. Mental health and wellness really isn't any different. Therapists should also be more like physical trainers... you need to have a specific goal in mind and work towards that goal and really and the endgame should be to no longer need the physical trainer/therapist

    Sadly in our economic system the incentive for a lot of people is the opposite and many bad therapist/trainers just want to generate dependency of their clients on themselves and as such they will indulge their clients worse habits to keep them hooked.

    Yeah.

    and there needs to be more oversight and punishment for objectively bad therapists. and I dont mean bad as in their program didnt work for you, i mean bad, like ones that spend an entire session fellating themselves over how awesome they are, or tell you that they arent here to listen to you bitch and moan about your problems (someone I knew had a therapist say that to them) or whatever other objectively awful things bad therapists too.

    and there needs to be more education about therapy, and how there are many different styles and approaches.. and not all work for everyone, The system should incentivize people being able to tell their therapist they appreciate their time, but it doesnt feel like their approach is working, and get refered to a different one with a different approach without drama, extra cost, extra paperwork, or headache.

  • Of course men will go to an AI for their problems, they can't fathom going to a woman for honest advice.

    And as a result, they gaslight themselves with a worse version of ELIZA.

    Of course men will go to an AI for their problems, they can't fathom going to a woman for honest advice.

    This seems a bit far-fetched, don’t you think? There could be so many reasons as to why someone would rather use AI than going to another person for advice (this is not just about women).

    Honestly, as someone who actually went to therapy and yes, my therapist was a woman. It’s was quite tough to open up and be vulnerable.

    I think for some people using AI, they might feel as if they’re not that vulnerable because it is not a person. However, they don’t realize that there’s data is being gathered.

    And as a result, they gaslight themselves with a worse version of ELIZA.

    With this, I can’t figure out whether you’re serious, trolling or just writing randomly.

  • good thing you're an authority on nothing then

  • Focus on fixing your country and making it a decent place to live. That way you don't need to go anywhere. That's what we've been doing for decades, and it works.

    You are the one that made this all about what does and doesn't apply to a specific area or country, into being a pro or anti whatever specific nationality discussion.

    Like I don't disagree that we should fix our own country, it is our responsibility... but you could have just said 'Damn, is it really that bad in the States?' or something like that, without being dismissive and hostile for... basically the only reason is you're tired of hearing about America I guess?

    ???

    Sorry I exist?

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

    They are human beings who are more frequently able to relate to people who are similar to them based on shared experiences including social pressures. I don't think either gender is unable to relate to the other gender, but social pressure is pretty strong and leads to common outcomes that involve pressures based race, gender, and economic status among others. Someone from a wealthy family is more likely to have a certain outlook compared to someone who had food insecurity as a child.

  • This is why you sucked in therapy and found it unhelpful. You're pissy, jaded and uncomfortable with the concept of being wrong. Classic men shit.

    Empathy would fix that, show that you don't have to be so insecure because nobody else is that secure.

    I thought it wasn't gender specific? This is very sexist of you. wags finger

    See how unhelpful that is to the conversation

  • Yeah.

    and there needs to be more oversight and punishment for objectively bad therapists. and I dont mean bad as in their program didnt work for you, i mean bad, like ones that spend an entire session fellating themselves over how awesome they are, or tell you that they arent here to listen to you bitch and moan about your problems (someone I knew had a therapist say that to them) or whatever other objectively awful things bad therapists too.

    and there needs to be more education about therapy, and how there are many different styles and approaches.. and not all work for everyone, The system should incentivize people being able to tell their therapist they appreciate their time, but it doesnt feel like their approach is working, and get refered to a different one with a different approach without drama, extra cost, extra paperwork, or headache.

    yes, there is an incredibly amount of ignorance, and a lack of oversight about the entire thing.

    and so many internet jackasses who think they are experts about it, constantly pushing endless misinformation about every aspect of the process. esp the armchair diagnosing.

    'oh you had a bad day at work? you must have autism/adhd/depression/personality disorder'. or the fact anyone who was ever mean to you once in your life is a 'narcissist' or 'gas lighting' you.

    the bias confirmation is out of hand. even in this very comment thread... soooo many people just banging on their bias confirmation drum and screaming 'no no no no, men are bad and should just go away and solve their own problems without bothering anyone at all ever!' as if that attitude isn't the biggest reason men, especially young men, feel so trapped about their lives.

  • Nonsense. The idea that all psychological issues are defined by gender is just the perspective of someone who's never made any meaningful progress through therapy and/or counseling. Mental health is not a gendered issue and the repetition of this misconception just leads more people to give up without even trying. Yes, the lens of sexual identity comes into play, mainly in terms of cultural gender roles experienced in your part of the world. But, a well trained, experienced therapist will have these considerations while exploring issues you present with. I would argue, that psychiatrists (which is an even moreso male dominated field) are much more of an issue, because their objective is not to help you come to conclusions about yourself. It is to medicate your symptoms away to allow you to function. I am sorry you did not have a good experience yourself, but that is not reflective of therapy, or counseling as a whole and your characterisation of men vs women in therapy is sexist and sounds more like male influencer talking points than lived experience.

    how many well trained therapists are there out there who are totally objective, compared to poorly trained ones who will often perpetual their harmful biases?

    does anyone know? how do we even measure that? do we just assume people who have a certain degree from a certain program are inherently 'objective'?

  • The genders are massivenly different in a lot of ways

    and even if you think that the psychology of genders isn’t different, society treats genders differently and this either from the therapist who reacts differently to different genders, or from the patient who expects difference the point is the same: the construct of gender forces artificial difference, even if it’s not based in real “our brains are the same” science (which they aren’t - same as our biology isn’t quite the same)

    equity is different to equality, and equity is actually what is needed

    and even if you think that the psychology of genders isn’t different, society treats genders differently and this either from the therapist who reacts differently to different genders, or from the patient who expects difference the point is the same: the construct of gender forces artificial difference, even if it’s not based in real “our brains are the same” science (which they aren’t - same as our biology isn’t quite the same)

    amen. brother, sister, or whatever preferred identity you want to be.

    more treating people as individuals, less as treating them as stereotypes

  • I thought it wasn't gender specific? This is very sexist of you. wags finger

    See how unhelpful that is to the conversation

    What the fuck? Can you read?

    Coping Skills are not gender specific. What a dope.

  • 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.

    Funny, I was just reading comments in another thread about people with mental health problems proclaiming how terrific it is. Especially concerning is how they had found value in the recommendations LLMs make and "trying those out." One of the commenters described themselves as "neuro diverse" and was acting upon "advice" from generated LLM responses.

    And for something like depression, this is deeply bad advice. I feel somewhat qualified to weigh in on it as somebody who has struggled severely with depression and managed to get through it with the support of a very capable therapist. There's a tremendous amount of depth and context to somebody's mental condition that involves more deliberate probing to understand than stringing together words until it forms sentences that mimic human interactions.

    Let's not forget that an LLM will not be able to raise alarm bells, read medical records, write prescriptions or work with other medical professionals. Another thing people often forget is that LLMs have maximum token lengths and cannot, by definition, keep a detailed "memory" of everything that's been discussed.

    It's is effectively self-treatment with more steps.

  • You are the one that made this all about what does and doesn't apply to a specific area or country, into being a pro or anti whatever specific nationality discussion.

    Like I don't disagree that we should fix our own country, it is our responsibility... but you could have just said 'Damn, is it really that bad in the States?' or something like that, without being dismissive and hostile for... basically the only reason is you're tired of hearing about America I guess?

    ???

    Sorry I exist?

    I also don't know what you want from me.

    You gave your opinion about Tik Tok girls, I disagreed. That's it, typical internet disagreement, you can move on now.

    I won't change my opinion on this matter so stop chasing after me like a homeless beggar.

  • Literally in therapy but okay. Continue to reject my perspective and unsupport a fellow dude. Hypocrites.

    dude people here just want to dunk on men because it makes them feel good about themselves. it's that sad, and that simple. they don't care about having empathy for men, men are not 'people'. they are 'others'.

    they don't really give a shit about... the issue at hand or the issues in the therapy industry/society that systematically disenfranchise many men.

    unironically they want men to 'man up' and 'fix' the problems and never acknowledge them. Because that is inconvenient for them and their viewpoints.

    because to them everything is a weird power struggle for their particular disenfranchised group, and they see anyone else acknowledging anything else struggles as a detriment to their cause. they lack the big brain thought that maybe lots of people suffer in lots of different ways and that it's not some zero-sum game about 'who suffers the most'.

    as if men's issue with the mental health care system... don't also apply to to various other groups. of which any one person can belong to multiples of those groups.

  • 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

    ok.

    but the problem is that real therapy is expensive, and unaccessible, while AI is freely accessible, even though it's shit.

    and open ai is profiting from that.

    I'm just saying the blame should be aimed at the corporations and the healthcare system, rather than someone who is desperate for help

  • yeah id say it’s not overt, but that’s kinda the problem… it’s almost difficult to identify, so when it comes to mental health for men a lot of the time society, therapists, etc almost gaslights us into thinking our problems aren’t problems

    if it were overt it’d be easy to identify… the fact what it’s not, the fact that men are the majority, and are the problem in a lot of cases pushes people to certain conclusions (including ourselves about our own problems)

    mental health is complex af

    incels are people. their problems are legitimate problems.

    why society can't acknowledge this is beyond me. I guess because it's socially unpalatable.

    incels or any extremist thing (terfs, religions extremists, etc) ... is a product of the same issues. but people just want those people to 'go away' and not address the issues that would actaully make them go away... because that is hard.

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    It's a bit of a sticking point in Australia which is becoming more and more of a 'two-speed' society. Foxtel is for the rich classes, it caters to the right wing. Sky News is on Foxtel. These eSafety directives killing access to youtube won't affect those rich kids so much, but for everyone else it's going to be a nightmare. My only possible hope out of this is that maybe, Parliament and ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority, TV standards) decide that since we need a greater media landscape for kids and they can't be allowed to have it online, that maybe more than 3 major broadcasters could be allowed. It's not a lack of will that stops anyone else making a new free-to-air network, it's legislation, there are only allowed to be 3 commercial FTA broadcasters in any area. I don't love Youtube or the kids watching it, it's that the alternatives are almost objectively worse. 10 and 7 and garbage 24/7 and 9 is basically a right-wing hugbox too.
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    Same, especially when searching technical or niche topics. Since there aren't a ton of results specific to the topic, mostly semi-related results will appear in the first page or two of a regular (non-Gemini) Google search, just due to the higher popularity of those webpages compared to the relevant webpages. Even the relevant webpages will have lots of non-relevant or semi-relevant information surrounding the answer I'm looking for. I don't know enough about it to be sure, but Gemini is probably just scraping a handful of websites on the first page, and since most of those are only semi-related, the resulting summary is a classic example of garbage in, garbage out. I also think there's probably something in the code that looks for information that is shared across multiple sources and prioritizing that over something that's only on one particular page (possibly the sole result with the information you need). Then, it phrases the summary as a direct answer to your query, misrepresenting the actual information on the pages they scraped. At least Gemini gives sources, I guess. The thing that gets on my nerves the most is how often I see people quote the summary as proof of something without checking the sources. It was bad before the rollout of Gemini, but at least back then Google was mostly scraping text and presenting it with little modification, along with a direct link to the webpage. Now, it's an LLM generating text phrased as a direct answer to a question (that was also AI-generated from your search query) using AI-summarized data points scraped from multiple webpages. It's obfuscating the source material further, but I also can't help but feel like it exposes a little of the behind-the-scenes fuckery Google has been doing for years before Gemini. How it bastardizes your query by interpreting it into a question, and then prioritizes homogeneous results that agree on the "answer" to your "question". For years they've been doing this to a certain extent, they just didn't share how they interpreted your query.
  • Is the ‘tech bro-ification’ of abortion here?

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    Nah. Been working in tech for nearly 30 years, "tech bro" is a delineation. Keeps the fuckers from smearing the rest of us
  • Let the A.I work or not?

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  • Why Decentralized Social Media Matters

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    Yeah we're kinda doing well. Retaining 50k mau from the initial user burst is really good and Lemmy was technologically really bad at the time. Its a lot more developed today. I think next time reddit fucks uo we spike to over 100k users and steadily grow from there.
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    Anyone here use XING?
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    Outlook.... Ok Pretty solid Bahaha hahahahaha Sorry. Outlook is a lot of things. "Gooey crap" would be one way to describe it, but "solid"? Yeah, no. Gmail is (well, was) pretty solid. There are a lot of other webmail providers out there, including self hosted options and most are pretty solid, yeah. Outlook, though? It's a shit show, it's annoying. Do you love me? Please love me, please give feedback, please give feedback again, please look at this, hey am I the best? Am I.. STFU YOU PIECE OF CRAP! Can you PLEASE just let me do my email without being an attention whore every hour? Even down to the basics. Back button? "What is that? Never heard of it, can't go back to the message I just was on because I'm Microsoft software and so half baked." Having two tabs open? "Oh noes, now I get scawed, now I don't know how to manage sessions anymore, better just sign you out everywhere." What is it with Microsoft and not being able to do something basic as sessions normal? I'm not even asking for good, definitely not "awesome", just normal, and that is already too much to ask. Try running it in Firefox! I'm sure it's totally not on purpose, just "oopsie woopsie poopsie" accidentally bwoken. Maybe it's working again today, who knows, tomorrow it'll be broken again. I run everything on Firefox except the Microsoft sites, they have to be in chrome because fuck you, that's why. Seriously, I can't take any Microsoft software seriously at this point, and all of it is on its way out in our company, I'm making sure of that