I’m a Therapist, and I’m Replaceable. But So Are You

I am a psychologist, and AI coming to my work. The signs are everywhere: A client explains to me how Chatgpt helped her better understand her relationship with her parents; A friend of the personal processor to treat anxiety with Claude; A Starting $40 million To build a highly charged shipping specialist. On the last day on Tiktok, I came across an influence sharing How do you not need friends. It can only ventes to God and ChatGPT. Virusi post went, and thousands were hung, including:
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]“Chatgpt talks about self -sabotage.”
“He knows me better than any person walking this land.”
“No fra! After my grandmother’s death, I told GPT chat to tell me something motivating … and he made me cry out of response.”
I will lie if I said that this did not make me feel terrified. I love my work – and I do not want to replace it. Although artificial intelligence may help to provide treatment easily for everyone, it is under my personal fears, lies a more worrying idea: whether the solution to the treatment crisis may cause a crisis of human communication unintentionally.
Treatment is a mature field for disorder. The bad processor Unfortunately, it is a common phenomenon, while it is difficult to find good therapists. When you can find a good processor, they do not take often insurance He always receives fees Large fees This, over time, it can add up. Artificial intelligence treatment can fill a huge gap. In the United States alone, More than half of the adults With mental health issues, do not receive the treatment they need. With the help of artificial intelligence, anyone can access a high skills processor, designed according to their unique needs, at any time. It will be revolutionary.
But the great technological innovations always come with differentials, and the transition to artificial intelligence treatment has deeper effects than 1 million Mental health professionals are likely to lose their jobs. Therapists of artificial intelligence, when normalized, have the ability to reshape how we understand the intimate relationship and weakness and what communication means.
Throughout most of the history of mankind, emotional recovery was not anything you did alone with a processor in the office. Instead, for the ordinary person who faces loss, disappointment, or conflicts between people, healing in collective and spiritual frameworks has been included. Religious personalities and Shaman Central roles – of rituals, medicines and moral guidance played. In the seventeenth century, the Cukeers developed a prominent practice called “Clarity committees“Where members of society meet to help the individual find answers to personal questions through careful listening and sincere inquiry. These collective methods of recovery came with many advantages, because they provided people with social ties and common meaning. But they also have. Dark sideEmotional conflicts can be considered as moral failures, sins, or even signs of demonic effect, which sometimes leads to stigma and rude treatment.
The birth of modern psychology in the West during the late nineteenth century was a deep shift. When Sigmund Freud started treating patients in his office in Vienna, it was not just a pioneering psychological analysis – he was converting how people dealt with the daily challenges of life. Sociologist Eva Ellus also notes in her book, Save modern spiritFreud gave “regular self -charm, as if she was waiting for her discovery and silence.” By persuading people who are struggling joint – from sadness to sorrow to family conflict – the proliferation of professional exploration, Freud helped transfer the emotional recovery from the joint field to the privacy of the processor’s office.
With this change, of course, progress came: what was previously seen as shameful moral failures that have become common human challenges that can be scientifically understood with the help of the professional. However, it has also turned into recovery into more than one solitary endeavor – identified from the networks of society that have long been pivotal in human support.
In the near future, artificial intelligence treatment can take Freud’s individual model for psychological recovery to the maximum party. Emotional struggles will not be treated in particular with another person, who is a professional, outside society – through which work may be done without any human contact at all.
On the surface, this will not be completely bad. Treatment of artificial intelligence will be much cheaper. It will also be available over 24/7 – You do not need a vacation or a sick day or to close the mother -in -law. They will not need to end a sudden session in a 50 -minute sign, or late due to the Chatti agent. And with AIS, you will hesitate to express yourself in any way you want, without any of the self -awareness that you may feel when it is face to face with a real person, body and blood. As one 2024 Ticket Show people felt less fearful of judgment when interacting with Chatbots. In other words, all the frictions inherent to work with a human professional disappear.
However, what many people do not realize about treatment, is that those hidden and uncomfortable moments of friction – when the therapist sets boundaries, eliminates a session at the last minute or says the wrong thing – is less important than advice or vision they provide. These moments often display usual ways of clients: the avoidance may be closed, while someone has self -esteem may assume that their therapist hates them. But this discomfort is where the real work begins. Good therapist guides customers to break old patterns – expressing disappointment instead of pretending to be fine, or asking for clarification instead of assuming the worst, or staying participants when they prefer to decline. This work extends beyond the treatment room, which leads to customers with the skills needed to deal with the chaos of real relationships in their daily lives.
What happens for treatment when we take contact with it? The same question can be applied to all our relationships. When artificial intelligence comrades become our virtual source of our emotional support – not like healers, but also as romantic friends and partners – we risk growing increasingly from the challenges that come with the human relationship. After all, why is wrestling with a limited friend available when there is always artificial intelligence there? Why the partner’s criticism is conveyed when artificial intelligence was trained to provide complete verification? Whenever we move to these algorithms that are completely and permanently, we said of patience that we may have for chaos and the complexity of true human relations.
Last year, in a He speaks At the summit of wisdom and the summit of artificial intelligence, professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Sociology Sherry Turkel He said, “With a Chatbot friend, there is no friction, second guess or contradiction. There is no fear of leaving it … My problem is not a conversation with machines – but how it causes us to transfer the value of what we should be a person.” Turkle hints to an important point: the challenges that make ties are also what makes them meaningful. It is in moments of discomfort – when we move in misunderstanding or reform after conflict – that intimacy grows. We have learned these experiences, whether with therapists, friends or partners, how to trust and communicate at a deeper level. If we stop practicing these skills because artificial intelligence provides a more smooth and more suitable alternative, we may erode our ability to form meaningful relationships.
The rise of artificial intelligence treatment is not only related to the therapists who are replaced. It is much larger – how we choose, as a society, deal with each other. If we embrace artificial intelligence without friction due to the complexity of true human relations, we will not only lose the need for therapists – we will lose the ability to bear the mistakes and citizens of our human colleagues.
Moments of tender embarrassment, disappointment, and inevitable emotional chaos, not relationships that must be avoided; They are the basis of communication. In a world where incomplete complications are complex than being a human being, not only therapists who risk limitations – we all all.