>>It's obvious that AI can't "fix your problems," but just writing stuff down can help us process.

Nobody can fix your problems, but having some one to talk to who listens without judgement and advices accordingly with empathy matters.

Thats what this is about.

Having said this, AI can write out helpful mini booklets on stressful situations in which humans have to work with each other.

I was going though a problem I'm having parents - they are aging, decisions need to be made, that sort of stuff. Writing it out, thinking about it, reflecting further - I probably spent at least and hour just typing in my thoughts as they came to me and honestly I often didn't read the AI responses.

All of that got me to realize that the problem wasn't that I wasn't explaining myself well. I kept thinking that if I'd just found the right words they'd change their minds. The process of digging into not just where they are now but who they've always been, how they've always been. I need to accept that and move forward.

That's rubber ducking. Or talking to yourself in the shower. Just feels less silly, because in theory you could have read the response.

I call it "interactive journaling"

agree. This cant do as much as genuine therapy (which requires another person, no way around it). But it is helpful in some ways. It helped me talk through something last week and it genuinely enriched my life in that way.

Does therapy actually work? Not by the numbers. tons enrolled, none cured.

Therapy keeps people alive that wouldn't otherwise be, and people coping that wouldn't otherwise be able to.

I've noticed that the human tolerance for extreme suffering leads sometimes to binary thinking. "Well they're still going to work even though they're made to piss in bottles, they must be fine with it!" Human experience is a wide array of emotions and states, I don't think we should try to separate into "cured/healthy" and "unhealthy/requiring adjustment by a mental health professional." Improving quality of life is also good.

Pretty gross comment. Just say you're cool and awesome cause you don't care about people. Virtue signal and move on, why make try to make a fake discussion?

I’m sincere . And blackmailing people this way is the gross part , not pointing it out

Oh, well, since you're sincere, the answer to your original question, "Does therapy actually work," is, yes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5509639/

You aren't sincere, though, since you followed it up with a clearly uninformed assumption: "Not by the numbers. tons enrolled, none cured." That you're uninformed is obvious: there's myriad papers demonstrating the efficacy of psychotherapy in treating all manner of diseases, furthermore, to say "cured" means you have a fundamentally uninformed understanding of medicine. Nobody that's spent any reasonable amount of time learning about medicine would so flippantly say something vague like "cured." How do you "cure" a limb with peripheral arterial disease? Well, you treat the patient by amputating the limb. Boom, they've been "cured" of PAD! You see, it's absurd.

Based on your site, you seem like a pretty smart guy, in engineering. Maybe when it comes to confidently dismissing entire swaths of knowledge, you should stick to your own field, rather than "sincerely" doubting an entire branch of medicine without even a single paper linked to support your position.

many disorders have cures. “Therapy” is unique in that the cure is more therapy and drugs. Therapy isn’t medicine. It isn’t an empirical practice. A board makes up subjective disorders, practitioners subjectively qualify patients and ply them with drugs. No relation to medicine.

Ah! Then it should be trivially easy for you to write up a paper disproving the various supportive studies for therapeutic treatments and their efficacy.

We all get you have this strongman opinion about mental health, what I'm telling you is that your objection is roughly as convincing as a flat earther pointing at great circle lines and saying "see, makes no sense!"

You're also simply wrong about psychotherapy being unique in that it's the only ongoing treatment. Not only does it for many people reduce to yearly check-ins or less once they have the tools to manage whatever they're managing, there's other diseases that are treated with various therapies (physical, for example) until death: ALS, for example.

They very word, "therapy," just means "treatment."

round earth has empirical diagnostics that anyone can perform, even laymen, to prove it to themselves.

The mental illness model is just a book of definitions, made up by a board. there are no objective diagnostics in the book. Even claims about endocrine disfunction have no practical clinical measurement. It's not based on any empirical research , it's based entirely on subjective judgements. Every new version of the book has new "disorders" that are entirely made up .

Don't play dumb with words. words have connotations. It's obvious we are talking about talk therapy, psychotherapy more broadly, psychotropics and the popular trends around that connotation of "therapy".

The entire psychiatric / psychotherapy industry believes in that book like a bible. No amount of opposing evidence will change their mind , because they've fabricated a supernatural domain. There's no way to disprove a religion.

You've constructed a strawman of the field of psychiatry and are arguing against it. I assume you mean the DSM5? It's basically a dictionary. Is the entirety of the English language and all things that happen in it represented by the Oxford English Dictionary? Read it and you've already read Shakespeare AND Google's transformers white paper!

You're ignoring mountains of studies with empirical evidence for the efficacy of various psychiatric treatments.

You think you're being empirical because you can't find a chain between a molecular chemical reaction and a given psychiatric disorder and its treatment, like the link between what a bacterial infection does to the body and then what the antibiotics do to the bacteria. I encounter this a lot in engineers, who are used to working in relatively simple, deterministic systems. If you want to blow your mind, go look up the data storage capacity of the DNA in a skin cell. Have trouble parsing a vibe coded PR, try parsing the human genome.

You're mistaken that what you perceive as subjective is related only to the field of psychiatry. The human body is too complicated to model accurately, so for example nutrition is also a highly "subjective" field leaning heavily on empirical data gleaned through studies, rather than a deterministic perfect link between the mechanisms of a tummy ache and the chemical composition of the food that might be causing it (actually it might be the food triggering a reaction in the gut bacteria which is... OR it could be psychosomatic OR it could be unrelated to nutrition at all and be ...)

If you need determinism and full system explanations to understand things, that's great, you chose the right field: computer science is easy to map. Down to the last bit, down to the logic gates in the CPU, you can describe everything, you can determine the exact cause of a bug or behavior. Biology and medicine aren't like that, especially not psychiatry. The human brain is widely considered the most complicated thing in the universe (that we're aware of). It can't be modeled or simulated with the degree of accuracy of a CPU. It's nondeterministic and unpredictable. The best we can do is do large aggregate studies and start picking apart the patterns and labeling them. It's definitely still an early science but that doesn't invalidate the treatments which studies show do work.

It's definitely weird the "power" of the human brain on human biology, but the evidence is overwhelming. Studies on psychosomatic symptoms, studies on placebo, studies on therapy treatments, if the effects weren't real, they wouldn't show up so consistently in populations across the world.

So again, I get it, you don't fully comprehend the field so you dismiss it. However I again remind you: your dismissals aren't convincing, they just expose your ignorance of this topic. Go on believing whatever you want, but I guess I'd recommend keeping this confident ignorance to yourself.

What I suspect is you specifically believe some subset of psychological disorders are "fake," am I right? If I had to guess, for people with your opinion, it's usually, depression, ADHD, maybe autism, and maybe gender dysphoria? Lots of other disorders listed. Surely you don't think schizophrenia is fake? Tourettes? PTSD? If you're gonna say the whole book is fake you have a lot of studies you need to dismantle.

Not a single person who read this thread (including you) honestly believes you are trying to have a sincere discussion

Certainly I do. The subject is if AI can be better than therapy. My position is : yes, because therapy (as commonly practiced) is terrible, so the bar is low. Also , AI can be a great therapy (in the real sense)

Worked great for me. Big recommend. "Cured" is mostly an unspecifiable state, and while certainly there's lots still wrong with me, I am healed far beyond my expectations at the outset, so increment your count by one.

Healing probably is the wrong analogy.

Is a person with a crutch healed? No. But they can walk, when before they could not. Therapy can't erase the past, but it can give people tools to live more capable and rich lives. A crutch doesn't regrow an amputated leg, but it does help that person handle the injury, so in that sense, it 'works'.

the psyche is not the same as the body, the model of “disease”/treatment/cure is not the same and analogies are of limited utility

I dare you to find a single person without "abnormalities"

Then which ones is therapy aiming to fix?

Those that start negatively impacting day-to-day life significantly, although I believe nearly everyone can benefit from some sort of therapy.

With most therapy the goal isn't to cure, but to manage and help cope in a healthy way. There are also plenty of mental illnesses or disorders that have no cure, and a few that are in the DSM because they cause problems with how our society is structured, not necessarily because its a true disorder (its only disorder because it causes issues functioning within societal systems).

They are made up. None of them are empirically or objectively defined

I think it's neither made up, nor actual health care.

It's basically a replacement for having cultural and social guard rails, lots of community, lots of straightforward expectations of roles etc. Today, people are atomized and lost, so they need a friend-and-priest-replacement who has authority but also patience to hear you out and has experience with judgement calls about people's lives.

But all this talk about "healthy" ways of coping etc is basically just there for medicine-envy and insurance reasons.

I think having one's mind/spirit sorted out is quite important, but the specific textbook strategies of today may be indeed mostly hogwash through a strict healthcare lens.

much therapy is basically what youre saying, but the real deal is not, and is a more genuine healing experience that can only be facilitated by an expert

Oh! Just like happiness then! /s

It works at least as well as placebo!