- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
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.
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Sometimes I wonder if I am, in fact, a man, because every time an article like this rolls around I’m like the fuck I do.
for me, beer with friends solves it
I only have the beer part of this equation figured out.
You have friends?
everyone’s a friend which drinks beer at the same table 🍻
Amen
Better than nothing I guess. Obviously it’s a privacy nightmare. But therapy is hard to reach nowadays and I’ve noticed that many men are reluctant to make that step. It’d be preferable if they did, but if ChatGPT can at least give an outlet for the emotions then it might just save a few people. Seeing men demolish themselves because they’re too ashamed to seek help is something I’ve unfortunately seen quite often. Even though I’m aware of this I’ve still waited till it was way too late because I subconsciously didn’t want to give in to the “weakness”. I hate that men are conditioned this way, it costs lives.
many men are reluctant to make that step
Sometimes it’s not the patient to blame. I made the step, countless times since my childhood… I sought help… Result? Got several, diverging diagnostics, several medications that didn’t work, until the most recent psychiatrist and psychologist some months ago: the psychiatrist said I got “nothing” (even when I had a fresh cut on my wrist) and the second “struggled to find any complaints from me”. So I simply gave up on seeking medical care (and “care” in general, human or whatnot). I don’t use AI for therapy because, as a former programmer, I’m deeply aware of their underlying Markov chain and NN algorithms, but sometimes their probabilistic outputs lead me to insights I couldn’t get from any living Homo sapiens beings (such as the possibility that I have “Geschwind Syndrome”, a condition of which will probably stay undiagnosed).
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.
And it’s awesome. Men aren’t allowed by others to show weakness. AI therapy genuinely helps a lot.
Or it gets them into a negative feedback loop since AI hardly ever tries to contradict you.
But yeah. At least they’re opening up to someone/something.
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.
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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.
You know, I don’t even disagree with that sentiment in principle, but expecting people to suffer when they could benefit from a technology because they only see the threats and dangers makes them no different than antivaxxers.
It is possible and logically consistent to urge caution and condemn the worst abuses of technology without throwing the baby out with the bath water.
But no… I guess because the awful aspects of the technology as far as IP theft are - rightfully - the biggest focus, sorry, poor people, you just have to keep sucking it up and powering through! You want empathy, fork over the $100 an hour!
For a community called “technology” there’s a pretty strong anti-AI bubble going on here.
Are you surprised people have opinions about technology, in a community dedicated to discussing technology?
No, just surprised about how uninformed and knee-jerk those opinions are.
Literally yesterday we had post about getting involuntarily committed due to psychosis from AI sycophantically agreeing with them about everything. The quote I remember from the ai in that “yes you should want blood. You’re not wrong.”
Using these as therapy is probably the worst thing we could do.
yep, if someone disagrees with me, it’s usually because they’re unhinged. People rarely know things that I don’t, because I am very smart. there’s no way that anyone downvoted that post because it makes statements that are inconsistent with the current scientific knowledge around this subject, because no such knowledgeable exists. I know this because if it did exist i would know about it, as I’m very smart. my AI therapist told me so. and i see nothing wrong with that post. so anyone who does must be a fool.
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therapy does not have to be expensive.
But it is though.
Your medicaid patients?
Poor. By definition.
Sure they might not pay a copay, but they pay for it in gas money to get to that visit, their barely running car now breaking down from visiting you, time off work they can’t really afford, time filling out reams and reams of fucking paperwork to be able to qualify for anything, likely when they’re already in a mentally comprimised condition to some extent… its all very stressful.
Which is very bad for mental health.
we have no reason to believe it would be any better than a paper journal and a CBT worksheet.
And the part you don’t want to admit (at least here) is that … that’s actually quite helpful in and of itself for a lot of people.
Have a few sessions with a live, in person therapist, to teach you CBT, give you the paperwork, walk you through it.
Not all, but many people can take it by themselves from there, and not need to keep wasting time and energy on continually requalifying for medicaid, getting to and from psych appointments, dealing with scheduling delays and unavailability, etc.
Yep, a lot of people are also helped by basically just having someone to be able to talk to and feel heard.
But… that’s often doable by just making either a friend or even casual acquaintance with someone who is capable of, and has the capacity for reflexive empathy.
Much less stress and paperwork involved there.
And also yes, some people with much more serious issues need much more serious help.
Unfortunately, the entire medical system in the US is utterly broken, and the only real solution is having a system that … isn’t broken, so that comprehensive screening and diagnosis is easily available without huge delays and costs… and more broadly, those people need to have the first two levels of maslow’s hierarchy of needs taken care of.
But currently our society basically just takes those people and throws them into the streets, evicts them, forecloses on them, incarcerates them.
There simply is no systemic way to help those people without major systemic changes… and those ain’t happening, they’re moving in the opposite direction.
…
The problem with LLMs as therapy is that they are wildly overconfident, agreeable to the point of encouraging delusions and dangerous behavior, they hallucinate facts that aren’t real… and they are not actually capable of legitimate critical thinking or reasoning.
They also will not introduce you to concepts you have never heard of before which you do not know are or could be very useful, unless you directly ask them to do that, and even then… they obviously are not experts themselves and may suggest dubious ideas.
But also, at the same time… people often do form what they will describe as meaningful relationships with an LLM. So… its not that ‘it doesn’t happen’, its that its a psuedorelationship, a fascimile of a relationship, lacks in person interaction, a real human modulating their intonation, having micro expressions, body language, etc etc.
Some people would rather yalk to something they know is fake than to talk to a person who may or may not be.
I can kinda understand the appeal. An AI isn’t gonna judge you, an AI isn’t gonna leave a mean comment or tell you to get over it and man up. It’s giving an unnerving amount of personal information to corporations, but I can sympathise with the thoughts these men are having.
I don’t think the open internet is a great place to open up about your mental health either. Trusted family, friends, and medical/mental health professionals are the best resources. Entrusting something as precious as your mental health to AI or the internet is a profoundly bad idea.
A local llm could (at least appear to) be the best option (on an individual scale) for people that would be reported by mandatory reporters (which mental health professionals are), such as suicidal people or murderers or pedophiles.
It might even, gasp, offer solutions.
Well those sound like people who aren’t good to open up to.
I do sympathize though, I pretended to be a guy for several decades, and my wife put exactly the same kind of duality on me that men put on women.
I was expected to be sympathetic and nurturing in some contexts and aggressive, jealous, and demanding in others, and I was just supposed to know when to switch.
And there was an amount of vulnerability I was able to display, but beyond that I’d get told to suck it up.
I think somebody needs to come up with an ad campaign that’s Therapy For Men. Big sweaty hairy guys with thick beards looking after each other’s mental health like BROs. It worked to get men to use soap.
(Seriously, I think counseling is too female-coded for a lot of men to be comfortable with it unless they’re fucking the person, or they start to want to fuck the person because they’re unused to talking about things).
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.
That was the whole premise of a King Of The Hill episode. Bobby and his friends working out their differences repairing Hank’s truck.
I dealt with the same thing in all my relationships. Nothing got my gfs hotter than when I acted like a complete asshole towards other people. They got off the duality of me being shit to people and the being this ‘sweet man’ to them. And they’d get super jealous and bitter if I was kind towards anyone else other than them. It was Toxic AF. It made me hate myself and made me depressed. To know that i had to be a shithead to get my girlfriends to like me.
I’m so much happier single. I’d rather not get laid then have to be a POS asshole like they wanted me to be. Soooo many people get off on anti-social behaviors. I’m also so glad I never got married or had children with these ladies who have such a horrible Zero Sum way of thinking about the world.
They wanted me to be vulnerable, but only in the sense that I was some heroic figure overcoming the odds. If i said I was sad when my dog died or my dad died, then I was a giant pussy to them.
When shitty people only validate your shitty emotions… well that’s why so many women only date shitty men. Because they are turned off sexually by men who are more complex or behave outside of their per-determiend ‘what a man should be’ image. Especially when you reject them for sex… holy shit. Way to see what a lady really thinks of a men when a man turns her down for sex.
In my many years single now, I do a lot of volunteer work. Giving back here and there w/ kids and adults and community building. I’ve never met or a dated lady who thought it was cool. They all think it’s weird to be kind to strangers and/or I’m secretly homosexual if I do so. If it comes up they always get ‘suspicious’.
You’ve met some shitty women. There are some of us out there fighting against sexism in all ways. Not for females but for all people. Sexism hurts everyone :(
AI might also be giving them better advice than anyone else in their life.
Growing up I certainly had no role models in my entire community. I never found anyone who was remotely helpful until I went to an expensive college that had lots of resources and they were freely accessible to me. Mental, physical, and academic.
A lot of people fail to realize these resources simple do not exist in large swaths of the country/economic bracket. They are mostly concentrated in wealthy and educated areas and given to wealth educated people who live there. If a farmer in Nebraska needs therapy, they will have to drive to multiple hours to Omaha or another urban area to have a decent shot at getting any assistance. Not everyone lives in a major coastal city that have the bulk of these resources.
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Part of me is ok with this in that any avenue to get mental health resources can be better than nothing. What worries me is that people will use ChatGPT for this sort of thing and these models will not be good help.
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.
Honestly of they could program a halfway decent AI therapist then art least it could take some of the load off our already insufficient mental health professionals by dealing with the lighter-weight cases, leaving the psychotherapists free to deal with the especially sick people.
The real problem becomes when bad or non scientific advice gets regurgitated to people over and over.
So… AI.
AI will reinforce delusional thinking. This is definitely not good.
more delusional people means more people that can make good music
I see a lot of people in this thread reacting with open hostility and derailment every time men’s issues are mentioned. Have you tried not being a part of the problem?
There are people like that for anything related to AI.
Combine that with men stuff and this going to be crack for all of those people
Allowing men’s issues to even be addressed risks giving legitimacy to the fact that these issues even exist. And if they exist, men can no longer be that evil monolith that exists only to be torn down and used as the cause for whatever is wrong with the world.
After all, the zero-sum game must be properly reinforced with an appropriate evil that cannot be allowed to have any weaknesses or redeeming attributes.
This thing has been trained on social media. Is that really wise?
I mean, I know they fixed it, but LLMs once suggested jumping off a bridge if you searched for help with suicidal ideation
“Having trouble quitting heroin? A little bit of heroin can really alleviate those cravings!”
I mean, that is basically what maintenance programs are :(
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.
It is methadone, but that is just a synthetic opioid. They say it is slower acting, and not as euphoric, but that all changes when you bang it. Some places will watch you take it though. However most don’t bother, they just want the money from the government and give you the pills.
Not only men at all.
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.
I didn’t know either, but let’s box people in before addressing things. What’s next, mens suffering through heat waves?
I thought june was pride month
Wait, we have one of those?
Genuienly had no idea.
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.
I don’t think it’s only men either, but it’s worth considering the implications and potential causes for what is being said here.
We have had not decades but centuries of macho culture, where mental health is a taboo for men because “I strong, me no cry” and we know that mental health struggles go underreported on men. This is just adding more evidence to a symptom that we already know, of a society that hasn’t been able to course correct because it’s too set in tradition to allow those who need help to seek it without feeling like garbage.
While I’m not saying this is a problem exclusive to men, I think the causes and effects on women and men are rather different. We’ve now known for a while that women with mental health issues or disorders tend to go undiagnosed (even more so than unreported). The case of autism is particularly blatant, as women only started to get diagnosed in a meaningful proportion in the 80s (despite autism not being sex- or gender-driven). https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/identity/autistic-women-and-girls
Similarly, that underdiagnosing came from the stereotyping of gender roles and the fact that being quiet and pretty equated being “feminine”, which is “good”, so can’t be autistic, because autistic is bad.
Fair, but it’s still a shady title IMO.
Just a “… mental health too” would have made it both correct and more nuanced IMO.
The performative masculinity of many men is also reinforced by partriarchichal norms in many women, who consistently belittle men who attempt to express their emotions without judgement, who demand macho men, who belittle men who aren’t financially better off than them.
Men can’t talk to most men, and they can’t talk to most women, society in general still largely demands they conform to the ‘bottle it all in, buck up and deal with it’ norm that is so very obviously harmful to men, and whoever they eventually take it out on when they have a breakdown.
… These are broad generalizations, but they are still broadly accurate.
Yep, the psychology industry/field has been unfair to women for a long, long time, often hideously so.
But no widespread progress on deconstructing and at least softening male machismo norms will be possible until we as a society acknowledge that… men are not the only sex/gender that often have ingrained patriarchal norms.
ChatCBT
If it had the memory for that, it might be useful. Plus another handful of caveats.
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.
I can’t find the story for the life of me right now but I’m pretty sure there was one a few months back where someone was talking with an LLM about their depression and suicide and the LLM essentially said “yeah you should probably do it.” because to the LLM, that was the best solution to the problem.
LLM will not be able to raise alarm bells
this is like the “benefit” of what LLM-therapy would provide if it worked. The reality is that, it doesn’t but it serves as a proof of concept that there is a need for anonymous therapy. Therapy in the USA is only for people with socially acceptable illnesses. People rightfully live in fear of getting labeled as untreatable, a danger to self and others, and then at best dropped from therapy and at worst institutionalized.
yep, almost nobody wants to be committed to a psych ward without consent
Also worth noting that:
1. AI is arguably a surveillance technology that’s built on decades of our patterns
3. Large AI companies like OpenAI are signing contracts with the Department of defense
If I were a US citizen, I would be avoiding discussing my personal life with AI like the plague.
It’s is effectively self-treatment with more steps.
And for many people it’s better than nothing and likely the best they can do. Waiting lists for a basic therapist in my area are months long. Shorter if you pay out of pocket, but that isn’t affordable to average people because it’s like 300-400 for a one hour session.
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something is always better than nothing. esp if you are starving.
Much easier if you just bury your feelings deep deep down. No repercussions whatsoever. The occasional psychic breakdowns but that’s normal.
