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

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  • Haha, not every place is in the US. Hopefully, I won't face this kind of treatment as I do not live in that shit hole of a country

    not every place is in the US

    Thank Sithrak for that, jeez...

  • Even therapists are suffering these days. It’s just more challenging than it’s ever been to gaslight clients into believing their concerns about the world aren’t objectively true and instead the symptom of an internal struggle.

    I wonder how many therapists end up gaslighting and depressing themselves by trying to unintentionally gaslight their patients.

  • Phasers to stun please. I was agreeing with you?

    They can't read lol

  • One chat request to an LLM produces about as much CO2 as burning one droplet of gasoline (if it was from coal fired power, less if it comes from cleaner sources). It makes far less CO2 to talk to a chatbot for hours upon hours than a ten minute drive to see a therapist once a week.

    Sorry, you’re right. I meant the training of the LLM is what uses lots of energy, I guess that’s not end user’s fault.

  • Sorry, you’re right. I meant the training of the LLM is what uses lots of energy, I guess that’s not end user’s fault.

    @MrLLM @Womble

    Question ... did someone once do a study comparing a regular fulltext indexed based search vs ai in terms of energy consumption 😉

    Second ... if people would keep using "old" tech -> wouldn't that be better for employment of people and therefor for social stability on this planet ?

  • Even therapists are suffering these days. It’s just more challenging than it’s ever been to gaslight clients into believing their concerns about the world aren’t objectively true and instead the symptom of an internal struggle.

    ...which are always conveniently treated by drugs!

  • 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.

    Buy more. Buy more now.

  • @MrLLM @Womble

    Question ... did someone once do a study comparing a regular fulltext indexed based search vs ai in terms of energy consumption 😉

    Second ... if people would keep using "old" tech -> wouldn't that be better for employment of people and therefor for social stability on this planet ?

    To your first question, nop, I have no idea how much energy takes to index the web in a traditional way (e.g MapReduce). But I think, in recent years, it’s been pretty clear that training AI consumes more energy (so much that big corpo are investing in nuclear energy, I think there was an article about companies giving up meeting 2030 [or 2050?] carbon emission goals, couldn’t find it)

    About the second… I agree with you, but I also think that the problem is much bigger and complex than that.

  • I'll admit I tried talking to a local deepseek about a minor mental health issue one night when I just didn't want to wake up/bother my friends. Broke the AI within about 6 prompts where no matter what I said it would repeat the same answer word-for-word about going for walks and eating better. Honestly, breaking the AI and laughing at it did more for my mental health than anything anyone could have said, but I'm an AI hater. I wouldn't recommend anyone in real need use AI for mental health advice.

    I'd say make a grilled cheese sandwich with quality Gruyere and Cheddar and take a nap after.

  • 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.

    CDC data from 2022 indicated that more than one in five U.S. adults under the age of 45 experienced symptoms of mental distress.

    Must be the lack of personnel. Couldn't have anything to do with the global insecurity of rising inflation and low wage jobs coupled with the skyrocketing housing costs. Not to mention the whole "the earth is steadily getting hotter and extreme weather events are happening more and more frequently."

    Yeah, let's invest in more AI that will fuck over the planet even more with colossal energy requirements and not even bother with making people more financially and socially secure.

  • My mental image the solution of your last paragraph is a guy and their counsoler just chatting outside chopping firewood or other simple/quiet lawn work.

    "I need a therapist, and a lumberjack"

    You know, working together on something outside might be absolutely the ticket. Genius.

  • So somewhere they feel safe to do so. Says something pretty fucked up about our culture that men don't feel safe to open up anywhere. And no, it's not their own fault.

    Everyday it seems to become clearer that American culture as whole is a problem. But that's not something people are allowed to talk about.

  • So somewhere they feel safe to do so. Says something pretty fucked up about our culture that men don't feel safe to open up anywhere. And no, it's not their own fault.

    I wouldn't use AI but I certainly don't have anyone to open up to really. Either they'd use what I tell them against me or just aren't in a position to offer any real support. With my luck I'd end up institutionalized for saying some unhinged shit anyway.

  • 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.

    assumptions assumptions!

    your presumption is that you'd be a better therapist, not a worse one, if you have more shared experiences with the client. that's not something current evidence supports.

    empathy means we strive to understand one another, not presume we understand them based on our own experiences. THAT is how bad therapy happens. and self-disclosure is a crutch for poor rapport building skills.

    without the shared experiences, there can be more drive for empath and mutual understanding. the feeling of being understood by someone outside your group can be transformative.

    In truth, positive outcomes have little correlation with therapist-client demographics. the demographic differential does alter what the course of therapy might look like, but not the outcomes.

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

    Have you considered the fact that most of the time, even when people "want to hear mens issues", they reject them and tell them to man up? Maybe "superpowered autocorrect" could be a vector to nourish this severe lack of openness?

    Personally I use AI for this purpose, mostly because it accepts me for who I am and provides genuine advice that has actually helped me improve my life, rather than the people around me saying that I should "put more effort into things", or "it's just in your head".

    It's not "lone wolfing" to stop telling the people who've rejected your concerns about your feelings and issues, it's just the act of not wasting time on those who don't care.

  • assumptions assumptions!

    your presumption is that you'd be a better therapist, not a worse one, if you have more shared experiences with the client. that's not something current evidence supports.

    empathy means we strive to understand one another, not presume we understand them based on our own experiences. THAT is how bad therapy happens. and self-disclosure is a crutch for poor rapport building skills.

    without the shared experiences, there can be more drive for empath and mutual understanding. the feeling of being understood by someone outside your group can be transformative.

    In truth, positive outcomes have little correlation with therapist-client demographics. the demographic differential does alter what the course of therapy might look like, but not the outcomes.

    your presumption is that you’d be a better therapist, not a worse one, if you have more shared experiences with the client. that’s not something current evidence supports.

    That isn't something I said or what I meant. Have fun arguing with your strawman.

  • i pivot to wealth inequality because the wealthy have all the resources and the rest of us don't have enough.

    that includes access to medical care and mental care. easiest way to get healthcare and therapy is to be rich so you can pay out of pocket and skip the limits/lines imposed by insurance companies.

    a lot of people's mental and health problems would also simple be alleviated by being able to have better food and a better work-life balance, both which are privileges of the wealthy that the less economically fortunate do not have access to.

    these are straight facts, but i'm sure you'll go into denial mode about how the poor and mentally unwell should just become their own therapists or something.

    You just lack the self-awareness and victimise yourself under the guise of "men's issues" so that other guys can emapthise with you and give credence to the idea that men are simultaneously completely forgotten about and that mental healthcare is a soft-science, or doesn't work for us. When clearly you can see how in this male dominated space, your feelings are not forgotten about. But, because you've never actually been to therapy and don't understand the core concepts. Everything falls back to "society treats women like this and treats men like this" and "this is the reason therapy is bad." When the reality is that self-reflection and analyses is hard and a skill and very taxing. That's why people do drugs instead of going to therapy. It's why men coalesce around the idea that we're treated "worse" by "society" forgetting that men and women basically make up all of society. Ironically, making your own safe space where you can appeal to shallow emotional arguments around injustice and inequity, while also complaining that the tools, knowledge and science we have at our disposal don't work.

    It's this really apparent cognitive dissonance that you display here. i.e. You take the premise, stating that talking about your feelings, analysing your behaviour and coming to conclusions about yourself (therapy) is a waste of time. But also, nobody cares about men's issues and your psychological state isn't something you have any agency over, but it is a rational response to the state of the world around you. You should read Viktor Frankl. He was an Austrian Neurologist and psychiatrist who was put into forced labour at a concentration camp during World War 2. It nearly killed him, but he survived and died 50 years later. He published a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. Which is a detailed account of how happiness can be achieved in the most unthinkably monstrous circumstances. How Love, Beauty and Humour can exist if you look for and cultivate them and how those glimmers, no matter how small. Lend to his assertion that meaning can be found in the most miserable of conditions.

    Which immediately discounts the doomerism you display in your other comments. I'd also say listen to some Alan Watts if you really are stuck in this mindset. He was much more a philosophical entertainer than an actual great thinker. But, one of his better opinions is that, you are your mindset and your mental health. Like, if you perceive, or tell yourself you perceive all of these horrible things about the economy, housing, the state of human loneliness. Then that is what you feel, it will be true to you and you will be unable to do anything. Alternatively, if you move away from constantly thinking about existential threats. To just actually, what is in front of you perceptively. You can find these glimmers of positivity that give your life dignity and meaning. It's the same as before, when I confronted you on the sexism of saying, "women are therapists, women can't understand men. Therefore, mental healthcare doesn't work for men."

    I confronted you about that and then you made it existential by tasking me with finding how many therapists across the entire field (and there are thousands of niche categories within this discipline, just fyi) are unbiased.

    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’?

    Which are things no one can possibly know, which are not necessary to know in order for what your saying to be proven false, or for therapy to be effective. You purposefully make it existential by doing that. Because, now you've made an impossible task an essential requirement for you to change your perspective on things. You require it to change your perspective on therapy and actually go. This way, you dismiss what I am saying and then you don't have to do the thing you don't want to. You can just, sound like advocate for men's issues and then you can get all the emotional validation you require from other men, who also feel disenfranchised, in the form of supportive comments and updoots. All without having to go through the painful, (coded: humiliating) and personally challenging prospect of psychotherapy. Honestly dude, you read very much, like someone who really wants therapy.

    Who wants to understand why they are this way, wants to be understood and wants to improve their life. But, it's expensive, what if I don't like them? What if it doesn't work? So, instead you get emotional validation anyway you can. By appealing to the male disenfranchisement sentiment, which is literally everywhere online from Andrew Tate to Sam Seeder. It perpetuates wallowing in victimhood which is tantamount to drugs in terms of emotional coping. The ultimate goal of therapy is to overcome these issues. So, that while the factually true things about the negative existential events we cannot control continue to occur. It does not become a crutch to support your failures in interpersonal communications, bad behaviours, lack of motivation, or lack of emotional fulfillment. Seriously, I recognise from what you're saying that you've never been to psychotherapy. Genuinely, it would help you stop equating your personal feelings with the inequity of men's issues, which would make those problems feel less like existential threats and help you improve your life. I'm not even trying to be condescending, I recognise this as a neuroticism I have dealt with as a younger man and I can speak from experience. Confronting it honestly and with curiosity and self-reflection has massively improved my outlook on life and helped me become much more secure in my masculinity.

    Give it a try, because the other option is you just self-flagellate in this cyclical mindset of victimisation that doesn't actually go anywhere and is only validated by others caught in this myopic and isolating worldview. Give it a shot.

  • It's possible to reduce the privacy issues by using APIs with a local frontend. Given that APIs usually cater to companies instead of end consumers they actually have simple opt-outs for information logging.

    Requires a bit of know-how, and you'll be paying for your llm per use (not that bad actually, I've personally averaged <10$/yr in api costs) but at least you get to have all your personal issues on your local device instead.

    For a chatGPT-like experience you probably want the ooga booga web generation ui but there's others too.

    Personally I also ran some distilled versions of DeepSeek locally, though I'd imagine that isn't really possible for most people.

  • You know, working together on something outside might be absolutely the ticket. Genius.

    That was the whole premise of a King Of The Hill episode. Bobby and his friends working out their differences repairing Hank’s truck.

  • Even therapists are suffering these days. It’s just more challenging than it’s ever been to gaslight clients into believing their concerns about the world aren’t objectively true and instead the symptom of an internal struggle.

    Wow, I can’t say I’ve ever had therapists who gaslit me. Then again, I’ve purposefully sought out therapists who couldn’t prescribe meds.

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    When it comes to public outreach, the question is more “why not?”
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    You said it yourself: extra places that need human attention ... those need ... humans, right? It's easy to say "let AI find the mistakes". But that tells us nothing at all. There's no substance. It's just a sales pitch for snake oil. In reality, there are various ways one can leverage technology to identify various errors, but that only happens through the focused actions of people who actually understand the details of what's happening. And think about it here. We already have computer systems that monitor patients' real-time data when they're hospitalized. We already have systems that check for allergies in prescribed medication. We already have systems for all kinds of safety mechanisms. We're already using safety tech in hospitals, so what can be inferred from a vague headline about AI doing something that's ... checks notes ... already being done? ... Yeah, the safe money is that it's just a scam.
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    "Science" under capitalism has always been funded and developed by/for fascists. The originals in the USA were the founding enslavers. The nazis had their time. Now it's the zios. R&D for genocide as usual.
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    I love how they put up the English name after the first outcry of "where do I send the ambulance again" fears.
  • The AI girlfriend guy - The Paranoia Of The AI Era

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    At least that’s not how I’ve been taught in school If you had a bad teacher that doesn't mean everyone else had a bad teacher. You’re not teaching kids how to prove the quadratic formula, do you? We teach them how to do proofs, including several specific ones. No, you teach them how to use it instead. We teach them how to use everything, and how to do proofs as well. Your whole argument is just one big strawman. Again, with the order of operations Happens to be the topic of the post. It’s not a thing Yes it is! I’ve given you two examples that don’t follow any So you could not do the brackets first and still get the right answer? Nope! 2×2×(2-2)/2=0 2×2×2-2/2=7 That’s kinda random, but sure? Not random at all, given you were talking about students understanding how Maths works. 2+3×4 then it’s not an order of operation that plays the role here Yes it is! If I have 1 2-litre bottle of milk, and 4 3-litre bottles of milk, there's only 1 correct answer for how many litres of milk of have, and it ain't 20! Even elementary school kids know how to work it out just by counting up. They all derive from each other No they don't. The proof of order of operations has got nothing to do with any of the properties you mentioned. For example, commutation is used to prove identity And neither is used to prove the order of operations. 2 operators, no order followed Again with a cherry-picked example that only includes operators of the same precedence. You have no property that would allow for (2+3)×4 to be equal 2+3×4 And yet we have a proof of why 14 is the only correct answer to 2+3x4, why you have to do the multiplication first. Is that not correct? Of course it is. So what? It literally has subtraction and distribution No it didn't. It had Brackets (with subtraction inside) and Multiplication and Division. I thought you taught math, no? Yep, and I just pointed out that what you just said is wrong. 2-2(1+2) has Subtraction and Distribution. 2-2 is 2 being, hear me out, subtracted from 2 Which was done first because you had it inside Brackets, therefore not done in the Subtraction step in order of operations, but the Brackets step. Also, can you explain how is that cherry-picking? You already know - you know which operations to pick to make it look like there's no such thing as order of operations. If I tell you to look up at the sky at midnight and say "look - there's no such thing as the sun", that doesn't mean there's no such thing as the sun.
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    highly recommend using containerized torrents through a VPN. I have transmission and openvpn containers. when the network goes down transmission can't connect since it's networked through the ovpn container. once the vpn is restored, everything restarts and resumes where it left off. ever since I've had this setup running, I haven't had a nastygram sent to me.
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