The Impact of AI on Modern Therapy

Prior to the end of 2022 or the beginning of 2023, you might have thought about artificial intelligence (AI) as being the kind of far-flung science fictional technology you saw in the movies, and “generative” AI in particular was something you’d probably only hear thrown around in Silicon Valley or elsewhere deep in the tech industry. But when tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney launched, AI was suddenly in the public eye in a serious way. Users everywhere were playing with these apps, which can generate human-like text and graphics in response to prompts written in natural language. Businesses and developers rushed to figure out where they could fit Large Language Model (LLM)-based tools into their operations. Since then, the world of therapy has proven to be no exception.

Some therapy practices have already begun leveraging AI, and with so much development going on in the space you’ll doubtless see more therapist-focused solutions coming in the future. Understanding what’s out there will help you navigate how to best use these emerging technologies to help your clients live better (and help you work more efficiently), so let’s take a look at what AI tools you might be seeing soon if you haven’t already, what impact these tools are starting to have on how therapists deliver care, and what you might anticipate from an AI-enabled future.

AI Apps to Streamline the Therapist’s Office

With therapy offices experiencing a large influx of new clients over the past few years, many clinicians are finding themselves handling a full client load and then some. The inevitable increase in administrative work that comes with this, and the relatively slim resources most private practices have to run on, means that therapists are finding themselves having to spend more time filling out paperwork alongside helping more people.

AI-based solutions are emerging that aim to deal with the type of administrative work that stacks up for many medical professionals, with some evidence that automating tasks like note transcription, chart review, and even note summarizing can help address burnout. In the case of a therapist’s office, such tools could allow clinicians to focus more on client care and less on paperwork.

And while vendors are trying to address use cases across the board in medicine with such tools, some are emerging that are focusing on more therapy-specific territory. For instance, there have been some AI tools debuting that purport to point out trends and insights in therapy notes in order to help the therapist figure things out they might not otherwise pick up on.

If such tools prove reliable, the impact on the speed and depth of care could be big.

AI Driving Breakthroughs in Mental Health Research

Another place AI is making waves is in mental health research. With its ability to sift through and find trends in staggeringly large repositories of data, AI is being used to try to find new diagnostic criteria for mental health disorders that have been hard to clearly identify or separate from one another.

For instance, an AI-based solution meant to reliably diagnose depression through the use of facial recognition technology is now entering clinical trials. Another research team is exploring the use of AI to predict the onset of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder long before it would be otherwise identifiable.

While such tools are still in the research stage, it’s possible that one day, mental health professionals will use the most successful ones to offer definitive diagnoses and inform courses of treatment.

AI Therapy Apps

Probably the biggest, most talked about AI developments impacting the therapy world is the use of the AI chatbot apps that provide “therapy services,” interacting with a user as if they were exchanging text messages with a real person.

A recent Washington Post article on mental health AI points to some upsides to the use of this technology, though not without caveats. The article offers some anecdotes about a therapist’s clients who are suffering with PTSD and other anxiety-related conditions who can stave off panic attacks through texting with an AI chatbot. The sense of the bot “knowing” the client, having learned the client’s self-calming strategies, is able to remind the person during an attack in order to alleviate an acute mental health episode. This tracks with some earlier research indicating that chatbots may be effective in delivering certain elements of cognitive behavioral therapy to help alleviate stress and depression. A study in Nature refers to the technology as an “interesting complement to psychotherapy” but not a replacement for a human therapist.

However, the industry is finding a need for both guidance and caution around over-reliance on lifelike bots. The American Psychological Association (APA) recently warned Federal regulators about the threat of A.I. chatbots “masquerading” as mental health professionals and affirming, rather than challenging, dangerous beliefs in users, The New York Times reported in late February. Since chatbots do not know what they are saying, they can, when operating without proper guardrails, encourage self-destructive behaviors in users who instinctively treat them as though they are capable of human reasoning.

Therapy’s Human Connection in The Age of AI

While it’s difficult to determine the trajectory AI will take—which use cases will be remain commonplace, which will fall off for one reason or another, and which new ones will emerge—thinking about AI’s impact on modern therapy does give us some guidance not just on how to benefit from the technology at the moment, but how to approach any coming technological change.

Being able to assess the safety and the value of any online tool you see, plan to use, or that a client asks about, is an important part of navigating the world of modern therapy. The technologies that facilitate, extend, and enhance the human connection clients seek, whether they’re AI or otherwise, will be ones you’ll want to make the most of. And ShrinkThink will be here to keep you up-to-date, and keep your staff and clients onboarded with the best practices for whatever tools you and your clients need!