Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support
91–98 of 98 posts
Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mann…
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.
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."
Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support
#93Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support
#94[flagged]
Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 . Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed, but your posts are getting classified that way and, on inspection, this does seem justified. We tend to ban new accounts that post like this, but I…
Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 . Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed, but your posts are getting classified that way and, on inspection, this does seem justified. We tend to ban new accounts that post like this, but I…
I'm curious why this comment got flagged? At least to me it looks really human (typos, uncapitalized words, etc..)
Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious why this comment got flagged? At least to me it looks really human (typos, uncapitalized words, etc..)
im curious too because i am not using ai and now im literally scrutenizing how to even talk here. Even asking ai how this even looks ai? what is even going on here?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48310576
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48310559
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48310458
As I said, it's impossible to know for sure - but we have no choice but to use imperfect measures because (1) the site is getting inundated, and (2) the community feels strongly about it.
In most cases when I've traced through similar cases with specific users, it turned out that they were using some tool (e.g. a grammar checker) that they didn't think of as AI-editing, but which was leaving LLM imprints on their text. So far it doesn't seem possible to run text through LLMs and not have that happen, but we have no idea how that will evolve over time.
For anyone wondering, I suppose I should add that this is in no way anti-AI! LLMs are amazing and we rely on them heavily; we just don't use them on text that we post to HN, since HN conversation is a social activity for humans. There was an interesting PG post about this the other day:
https://x.com/paulg/status/2058844147092488401, https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/2058844147092488401
Although he was writing about emails, not forum comments, the argument is much the same.
Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
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.