More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support

dvt

I'm not a psychologist or a mental health professional, but I think that this might serve a similar purpose as journaling. It's obvious that AI can't "fix your problems," but just writing stuff down can help us process.

sublinear

This is a little bit sad, but not that surprising. For a while now I've wondered how valuable this really is for crowdsourcing of sentiment and opinions. We went from yahoo answers to reddit and now to this. Those previous ways of getting input were notoriously full of trolls and ulterior motives, but maybe a one-on-one conversational format with no distractions is a higher quality source? Is it a feature or a bug that the LLMs are biased in favor of whatever junk their owners want?

tonymet

I’ve been using grok voice chat for mock dialogs to help practice diplomatic and candid conversations. I’ve found people increasingly dismissive and aloof in conversation. I prompt grok (it’s in my car) to role play as a medical billing administrator or similar reluctant authority to help practice resolving the disagreement.

randycupertino

I recently had to do a very hated, very tedious, very long, very boring task at work and I asked Claude to hype me up and give me a pep talk to conquer the task and it really did a great job. Then I got nervous if IT reads our prompts and felt very sheepish if they would be seeing my asking it that.

pizzly

Can see a place using it here. Most human psychologists patients see every week or so at a scheduled time, not because that is what is most effective in terms of treating your psychological issues but because of scheduling and cost reasons. Being able to get support at more regular intervals if done correctly may improve healing. The scheduled time may also not be the most effective time either. Events can happen on the day that reduce treatment effectiveness. The scheduling and resource allocation is a human problem (not enough psychologists, psychologists need their own personal boundaries and recovery time etc). A tool that can extend psychologists usefulness may be able to get the treatment that people actually need. Then there is the money aspect. Too many people don't have the money for psychological treatment. Having a cheaper alternative will help. Unless we actually start thinking outside the box here we won't solve mental illness and so all tools should be used.

swores

> "more than 6 in 10 people declare they already use AI for mental health questions. 42% of them almost always follow the advice it gives them." If these numbers were "of people who regularly use GenAI chat tools" then I'd be surprised it was quite so high already, but not shocked and would find it completely believable. But this seems to be "of all people surveyed", which I'm rather skeptical of - unless their sample was very biased (as an extreme example, if they recruited people to the survey only by linking to it in ChatGPT ads, but there are plenty of less extreme ways to get a sample group that's way more likely to use AI than a genuinely random sample of the whole population). It's also worth noting (and perhaps somewhat explains numbers seeming so unrealistically high to me) that, unless I've misunderstood, "turn to AI for psychological support" isn't necessarily "using AI as a therapist", it could be uses as minor as asking "Can exercise help with my depression?" or "If I think I am having a nervous breakdown, should I talk to a doctor?"

oh_my_goodness

Oh hell no. That's horrible.

sperandeo

honestly the bar isn't "is AI a good therapist." the bar is "is it better than staring at the ceiling at 2am." for most people, it is, and that's enough to explain the numbers. I know im curious to see how it responds.

Papazsazsa

If you have baseline epistemic hygiene there's nothing wrong with using an LLM for advice. If you have baseline epistemic hygeine you'd also recognized this as a B2B sales pitch: Axa sell group health, employee-assistance, and corporate wellbeing products.

cm2012

This is absolutely a good thing for the world.

RickS

This just makes sense. A normal day contains dozens of experiences that could be bettered by cheap actions that I am awful at predicting or imagining. I had an argument with a partner at one point where I was baffled and basically at a loss, asked chatgpt, and it spit back a response that seemed... okay. I adapted it into my own voice, keeping only what was sincere, etc (not just dumping LLM slop at another human, which is fucked, more like using it to coarsely choose a vector/filter through a big cloud of things I actually believe). My partner's response was incredible. It completely diffused the situation and my they were pleasantly surprised. Without the LLM, I would have been entirely unable to conceive of and walk that happy path. The problems we have with our psychology often involve deviation from the normal or desirable state, so a robot that spits out a cheap reversion to the mean can be really helpful. My flavor of this is somewhat autism-coded, but it generalizes well. EG people who aren't used to negotiating, valuing themselves, etc. Obviously LLMs output hallucinated dogshit and occasionally dangerous nonsense. But it must be admitted: a lot of our psychological hiccups can be solved by the thoughtless, typical advice. 38% putting them over professionals is nuts though. I would much rather have the real thing, but it's $200/hr and asleep at 3am.\

dataviz1000

"AI is replacing bartenders as everyone's therapist. On the bright side, the bartenders finally have someone to talk to about losing their jobs." -- Claude

Barrin92

> "Respondents report spending an average of 5.1 hours a day on screens during the week (excluding working and studying hours and excluding weekends), with screen time rising to 6.4 hours in the Philippines and Thailand. Two out of three people believe that this exposure has several negative, even if moderate, effects on their mental health." 5-6 hours excluding work and study is mental. I know "touching grass" isn't exactly a professional treatment plan, but instead of spending more time in front of a screen to fix mental health issues have we tried prescribing people to actually go out? If you're working eight hours, sleep seven, and maybe spend an hour or two cooking and doing daily chores, there's not even enough time left to exercise. no shit it's having a bad effect on their mental health, most of these people don't need a therapist, they need sunlight and their phone taken from them

ai_critic

Is anyone actually surprised? The baseline empathy and emotional intelligence of people, both online and offline, has absolutely tanked--I think Covid was the epoch, but arguably going a lot farther back since then. People are just shitty .

erelong

It's helpful tbh fam but I have no diagnosed issues, just ask for casual wellness ideas like a search engine (when compared to a search engine the headline is less surprising to me - "more than 6 out of 10 people search online for psychological support")

squirrellous

I think there are situations where AI is good for quick advice, provided you _also_ have a professional to talk to if needed. I sometimes seek advice about dealing with difficult colleagues, or ask for opinions about things I said at work while a little emotional. These don’t affect my personal life that much so the stakes are lower.

weakened_malloc

Is it really any surprise with how expensive psychologists and therapy are?

newtonianrules

Given how psychotic and demanding work environments have become, I definitely use it as a crutch.

agnosticmantis

I haven't done it yet due to privacy concerns, but I would totally do it with a private local model that's as intelligent as current frontier models and is not sycophantic and perhaps is finetuned on the psychology literature. My reasoning is that, if therapy is a well-understood science, then I trust a big finetuned LLM more than a run-of-the-mill human therapist. I will not be able to afford a Harvard trained psychologist. If therapy is more of an art and needs the human touch and mojo, then again, then again I'm not going to be able to afford Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung. The few times I've tried human therapists, my impression was that the questions and answers were fairly standardized, which I think LLMs can excel at. Not to mention I'm more at ease talking to silicon- than carbon-based creatures.

ruleryak

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