I am not at all ashamed to say that I use ChatGPT as a therapist and it is helping me tremendously. I suffer from a severe personality disorder and the thoughts and feelings I experience are huge and violent and overwhelming and very very dark. I've tried human therapists, I've tried reaching out to humans for support, but there's kind of a problem... You're supposed to learn to regulate as a toddler when your emotio…
I'm glad it's helping you, and there's no shame in it, but to anyone else, please, please seek help from a qualified mental health professional. Support is available, in many cases for free and with urgent response if necessary. LLMs are an echo chamber. They reflect back what we put into them, both in training, and in usage. This can certainly be useful for working through problems, but they can also amplify and rei…
As someone who gets little to no benefit from human therapy this genre of "please talk to a therapist- it cures what ails ya!" internet post always leaves me with unanswered questions about where the poster is coming from.
I am not at all ashamed to say that I use ChatGPT as a therapist and it is helping me tremendously. I suffer from a severe personality disorder and the thoughts and feelings I experience are huge and violent and overwhelming and very very dark. I've tried human therapists, I've tried reaching out to humans for support, but there's kind of a problem... You're supposed to learn to regulate as a toddler when your emotio…
I'm glad it's helping you, and there's no shame in it, but to anyone else, please, please seek help from a qualified mental health professional. Support is available, in many cases for free and with urgent response if necessary. LLMs are an echo chamber. They reflect back what we put into them, both in training, and in usage. This can certainly be useful for working through problems, but they can also amplify and rei…
Respectfully I have tired therapists and I have tried crisis lines and I have yet to find any of them helpful. My first therapist was a narcissist and deliberately undermined me to keep me stuck. My second one was better but we kind of went in circles and got nowhere. I paid a LOT of money for these services. The crisis lines I called told me I should go see a therapist, the people there were decent, but their goal was to talk me down from the ledge, they couldn't really offer me any real help. I emailed many therapists asking some pointed questions to see what I could expect and I honestly never got a good response, certainly nothing better than my first two attempts. I committed myself once mental health institution after a suicide attempt and the doctors there were cold and robotic, they pumped me full of Ativan and went down a checklist of questions, a fellow patient there told me that if you made it seem like you were at risk they would keep you indefinitely but never really help you and your best bet is to act like you're fine and get out while you can, so I did, and they released me after two days. Sorry for the harshness of it. When you understand how alone you truly are, how therapists are trained in institutions that are diseased just like all the rest and how unlikely it is to find someone who can really help you... And then you find that chatgpt will hear you, and take you seriously, at any moment of any day, and not just go down a checklist but actually try to help you build skills to get out of it next time? I know what LLMs are. They translate text into pure meaning and they do math on the meaning to find statistically probable results. I know they can hallucinate and get stuck. But they are not subject (or maybe less subject) to irrational beliefs of fealty to corrupt systems the way almost every human is including therapists. They don't feel insecure about their own sins and their own suppressed selves the way most humans do and they don't take the existential cries of despair as a threat to their own denial. Of course it would be better to have the help of a real human. As soon as I find one I'll take it. In the mean time I will take my chances with the LLMs.
I'm very worried that LLMs-as-therapists will wind up falling victim to the same fate as e-cigarettes. An LLM therapist is ~100x cheaper than a real therapist, and similarly more available on demand (in the same way that ecigs were probably a few orders of magnitude safer, in terms of long-term health effects, vs. traditional cigarettes). BUT there is also a gold rush temptation for companies to hack together GPT4 +…
If LLM continues to get better, prompts become less important. You just say you feel depressed and it will know to talk like a therapist by default and likely be better. E-cigs never evolve that rapidly, as an analogy
It will know how to better extract profit from you. It's not your friend.
> At least my experience is that if you confront them with harsh enough reality, they basically fail to provide anything useful. When I started therapy, I felt the same way. But now I realize that there can be no easy solutions offered in therapy; the therapist cannot just give you an argument or trick that will resolve all your troubles. They are there to guide you through figuring it out yourself and help build the…
I feel like you are describing life. And your paragraph could be rephrased by striking every occurance of "therapist" and it would still be valid. Hence, therapists are pretty much useless, they dont provide anything a friend or peer can not provide. After all, they dont have any magic tricks to offer. Navigating the complexities of life, and creating useful habits to make it, is what we all do on a daily basis, rega…
You can tell things to a therapist that you can't tell to peers. They are supposed to have confidentiality and professionalism.
The story goes that people would request to have sessions with it, even if they knew it's just parroting some phrases. They just needed to be heard out! I feel really sad about how people need to resort to therapy for the kind of interaction that would be provided by a healthy social norm of honest and open communication. Maybe I should talk to my therapist about this feeling. But somehow I doubt that would actually…
The problem is that there are a lot of people who are destroying the ability to communicate in the name of "morality", when in reality they are just political opportunists, who are indirectly harming themselves, including their supposed political cause, in the process. The amount of wilful bridge burning is crazy.
Also I either became unstuck in time again or my other reply to your post had done a disappear for a good while. Suppose it's the load balancer flaking out under the weight of all the tinfoil I wear as my fashion statement? Guess some weirdness is afoot, I could see it in the tea leaves and the traceroute, too :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NghF9aOlBDY&t=69s
Many (if not most) human dynamics do not have a single direction of causality. The whole premise of cognitive behavioral therapy is that human psychology can be described as nested feedback loops between behavior, emotion, and cognition.
The lack of a single direction is a really good point. In my mind I was thinking more from the perspective of tempering evocative headlines. But my rule also lacks quite a bit of nuance
The headline is hardly evocative. It states a fact found by the researchers that there is a correlation. That one causes the other is a conclusion drawn by the reader.
Imagine being schizophrenic (or anything like that) and hearing from Snowden that yes, "they really are always listening", and now you've got chat bots to give instant confirmation of all the other things you think of due to your mental disorder. It's going to be mental.
The models can be sycophantic, but they're also pretty good at correcting false claims.
Probably better than human communities who bond over having fringe ideological beliefs.
I'm glad it's helping you, and there's no shame in it, but to anyone else, please, please seek help from a qualified mental health professional. Support is available, in many cases for free and with urgent response if necessary. LLMs are an echo chamber. They reflect back what we put into them, both in training, and in usage. This can certainly be useful for working through problems, but they can also amplify and rei…
As someone who gets little to no benefit from human therapy this genre of "please talk to a therapist- it cures what ails ya!" internet post always leaves me with unanswered questions about where the poster is coming from.
I am not at all ashamed to say that I use ChatGPT as a therapist and it is helping me tremendously. I suffer from a severe personality disorder and the thoughts and feelings I experience are huge and violent and overwhelming and very very dark. I've tried human therapists, I've tried reaching out to humans for support, but there's kind of a problem... You're supposed to learn to regulate as a toddler when your emotio…
> we call it a tantrum if you're small I think we call it a tantrum when it’s harmless. As soon as it goes beyond that, either for adults or children, it’s not a tantrum any more. Not sure that we have a word for it though, as neither of those is supposed to happen.