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.

Got it. No therapist it is.

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

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.

Everything collects data. To extrapolate, it’s stupid to post on lemmy or shitter because the same will happen.

And you, coward? You can shove your downvote. You should feel ashamed of yourself for shaming people for seeking help because YOU don't approve of the way they go about it.

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.

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.

Even in Canada, where mental health is still a value-add for most of us and not a right even under our current system, we are offered a fund with some jobs to use for either physiotherapy or mental health, and it's a limited fund.

Give us a choice, and 10/10 times we will prioritize being able to walk and move and sleep effectively over feeling good about it.

And you people complain about our ignorance...

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.

Wait, we have one of those?

Genuienly had no idea.

genAI chatbots are so predatory

Donald Trump was ELECTED TWICE. How is the stupidity of humanity not apparent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.