Getting a real, in person, therapist is already a pain in the ass. Finding a place that takes your insurance and isn't fully booked is a real process. There's now super easy access to apps for Telehealth therapy like Talkspace that insurance likes to endorse, but the quality on all the ones I've tried is very low. It's basically Uber for Therapists (and not 2013 Uber).
The hours are usually pretty constrained, the therapists are not great in general, they'll cancel last minute all the time. I had one show up clearly drunk. You'll get therapists that tell you they only do text messaging, no phone call or video chat.
Found a lady whose profile looked like it aligned pretty well with what I was looking for, but she apparently rejects all appointment requests from men (had my wife try to make one and the lady accepted it within minutes).
It's a shit show. I have no doubt AI therapy will become a thing.
> It's a shit show. I have no doubt AI therapy will become a thing.
I'm having a hard time figuring out your point. Is it 1) AI therapy will be good because your experiences have been so bad or 2) the ideological framework we currently have corrupts everything and has already corrupted therapy.
Honestly, after reading your comment and the Talkspace wiki page. It sounds to me like a garbage product in much the same way I expect "AI" to be: cheap through compromised quality, therefore favored by the powers-that-be.
I mean AI therapy could succeed simply because it has the potential to be cheaper and easier to access than the competition. Definitely easier than scheduling in person therapy. And when comparing to the current cheapest and lowest friction easy access products, they are just not very good. Most are poor to use from a technical perspective, and all from a quality of care perspective.
Beyond price and ease of access, talking to a robot that isn't even capable of judging you might even be more appealing to some people.
Would a therapy tuned gpt-4 be adequate? Probably not, but who knows what the landscape looks like in a decade or two.
This is all obviously US centric and a biased opinion based on my personal experience.Talkspace is currently the best among these products in my experience, but that's only from a UX perspective, they all suffer from the same fundamental Uber for Therapy problems.
> I mean AI therapy could succeed simply because it has the potential to be cheaper and easier to access than the competition.
So basically, a repetition of the exact same point made upthread about nurse practitioners and AI? Instead of the "goal should be to allow everyone equitable access to the best healthcare," we choose "subpar AI healthcare for the disadvantaged [or merely non-wealthy] because 'it’s better than nothing'."
I should also note that therapy only came up in a joke mocking the myopia of too technology focused ideas of progress.
> Beyond price and ease of access, talking to a robot that isn't even capable of judging you might even be more appealing to some people.
I suppose, for a small subset of physiological problems and a certain uncommon types of people (which are likely vastly underrepresented among software engineers, especially those on HN), but my guess is that the impossibility of any kind of human connection is going to be a huge negative for most.
The hours are usually pretty constrained, the therapists are not great in general, they'll cancel last minute all the time. I had one show up clearly drunk. You'll get therapists that tell you they only do text messaging, no phone call or video chat.
Found a lady whose profile looked like it aligned pretty well with what I was looking for, but she apparently rejects all appointment requests from men (had my wife try to make one and the lady accepted it within minutes).
It's a shit show. I have no doubt AI therapy will become a thing.