A profound relational revolution is underway, not orchestrated by tech developers but driven by users themselves. Many of the 400 million weekly users of ChatGPT are seeking more than just assistance with emails or information on food safety; they are looking for emotional support.
“Therapy and companionship” have emerged as two of the most frequent applications for generative AI globally, according to the Harvard Business Review. This trend marks a significant, unplanned pivot in how people interact with technology.
Almost like questioning an AI is free while a therapist costs a LOT of money.
There are other causes here.
They’ve been talking for a while about how the low participation in dating by Gen Z women is because they’re tired of being the entire support system for men experiencing a loneliness epidemic.
It’s a lot of pressure for the women to be under, and so they’re withdrawing.
I’m guessing this is one of the driving forces as well. Lack of real, emotionally intimate human connections around them. Many men are quite fucked in that regard right now.
because they’re tired of being the entire support system for men experiencing a loneliness epidemic.
I’ve got no horse in this race but it appears that ‘men should not be afraid to open up’ articles and tweets were followed by ‘men, we are not your therapist’.
🤷♂️
I’m a therapist who works almost exclusively with men. Here one pattern I’ve seen often:
- Man is conditioned from a young age not to identify, process or express his feelings
- Man doesn’t share his feelings with anyone - friends, family, partners - for years
- Man sees woman as safe, caring and validating
- Man confides in woman only and continues not sharing feelings with others
- Woman becomes overwhelmed, resentful, dismissive
- Man gets the message that he never should have opened up in the first place
It can be true both that men need to open up more and should not treat their partners as therapists. We all need support systems because no one person can always be available to give us everything we need. It’s not wrong to confide in a partner, but if that partner is the only confidant it’s precarious for both. And I want to emphasize this is not the fault of a man, or men as a community. This is the result of generations of conditioning from both men and women, and both men and women play a part in the solution. I also want to recognize that many of us don’t have a network of people we could open up to even if we wanted to, and many more can’t afford therapy.
If anyone reading this can afford therapy, I highly recommend it. It’s a place to undo some of that conditioning, to sit with someone who’s committed to listening, caring, and not judging.
man is conditioned from a young age not to show feelings
I feel like you skipped over this part way too quickly. Myself and other men have been hearing things like “it’s not manly to cry”, “whining isn’t going to do anything for you”, “being weak is girly”, and countless other things for my entire memorable life
And it’s not just men telling me this. It’s men, women, adults, my classmates, teachers and mentors.
It’s not a good thing. And it’s changing now, which is so good. But man hearing that from your earliest memories makes it really set in.
Thank you for expanding on that point. I meant it to be a “here’s how we got here” before the rest of my “this is where we are today.”
You’re totally right, and any conversation about men’s behavior at large should include the experiences you just described. Even though we didn’t get ourselves into this situation - in that we didn’t raise ourselves - we’re the ones who will get us out.
🤔
That’s interesting… had never seen it put that way before…
It’s almost like telling men that it’s okay to show your feelings is bullshit lol
Do you think this therapist is trying to market therapy and increase his business? I also think the same 🤨
/j
Because they want us to open up, just not to them. T
The irony is so many anti-patriachical feminists, still desire the patriachy. They still want dominant tall wealthy men to romance then, but at the same time they claim to wait to tear these men down into some genderless socialist utopia… where they’d never want to ahve sex with any of the ‘ideal’ men they believe woudl exist in this society.
You can’t have it both ways.
I think there’s a lot more to it than cost. Men, even with considerable health care resources, are often very averse to mental health care.
Thinking of my father in law, for example, I don’t know how much you would have to pay him to get him into a therapist’s office, but I’m certain he wouldn’t go for free.
Also talking to ChatGPT, if done anonymously, won’t ruin your career.
(Thinking of AD military, where they tell you help is available but in reality it will and maybe should cost you your security clearance.)
won’t ruin your career
Granted, but it still will suck a fuck ton of coal produced electricity.
One chat request to an LLM produces about as much CO2 as burning one droplet of gasoline (if it was from coal fired power, less if it comes from cleaner sources). It makes far less CO2 to talk to a chatbot for hours upon hours than a ten minute drive to see a therapist once a week.
Sorry, you’re right. I meant the training of the LLM is what uses lots of energy, I guess that’s not end user’s fault.
To your first question, nop, I have no idea how much energy takes to index the web in a traditional way (e.g MapReduce). But I think, in recent years, it’s been pretty clear that training AI consumes more energy (so much that big corpo are investing in nuclear energy, I think there was an article about companies giving up meeting 2030 [or 2050?] carbon emission goals, couldn’t find it)
About the second… I agree with you, but I also think that the problem is much bigger and complex than that.
Yeah, but also one of them is helpful and the other is the exact opposite. If the choices are AI therapist or no therapist, you are still better off with no therapist.
Got it. No therapist it is.
That’s what I’m doing. That and screaming into a pillow most nights.
I don’t scream into a pillow. I just wake up at dawn and have a panic attack until I have to actually move.
that’s easy to say, but when someone is in a crisis, I would be wrong to judge then for talking to an AI (shitty terrible solution) instead of a therapist that can be unaffordable and also comes with a risk of then being terrible.
I’d be interested on a study there.
I lot of therapy is taking emotions and verbalising them so that the rational part of the brain can help in dealing with things. Even a journal can help with that, so talking to an inanimate machine doesn’t seem stupid to me.
However therapists guide the conversation to challenge the patient, break reinforcing cycles, but in a way that doesn’t cause trauma. A chatbot isn’t going to be the same.
I’m gonna need a source on that.
It’s stupid as hell to share any personal information with a company that is interested in spying on you and feeding your data to the nearest advertiser they can find.
Like seriously – are people using their brains or what?
Donald Trump was ELECTED TWICE. How is the stupidity of humanity not apparent.
are people using their brains or what?
What? No. Seriously, are you new here? And by here I mean Earth.
I see idiots all around me. Everybody only interested in advancing themselves. But if we advanced the group, it would be better for EVERYBODY.
But we as a species are too stupid to build a society that benefits everybody.
So no. No brain use here.
I mean, the question was rhetorical. But I don’t disagree.
Like seriously – are people using their brains or what?
they need therapy, obviously they need help, and blaming them for not doing the most reasonable thing that might be unaffordable is even stupider.
blame predatory AI, openai could in a single afternoon make it so Chatgpt recomends or even helps you find a local therapist, instead of enabling this for profit.
Do they need therapy? Or do they need a world they can actually fucking live in?
It’s not like either one is available to them.
Neither is mutually exclusive, but most likely, both of those.
Everything collects data. To extrapolate, it’s stupid to post on lemmy or shitter because the same will happen.
Alternate title “Men so starved of sources of support they resort to talking to AI”
Edit: have started a new com for men to talk to each other instead of AI !Reprieve@lemmy.zip
Or “men would rather talk to superpowered autocorrect rather than sharing their feelings with family and friends”
This response is why men feel scared and uncomfortable opening up. You are a part of the problem. For your male family members’ sake, I hope you check in on them instead of just being sexist online.
Men feel scared and uncomfortable because they’re afraid to be told they were wrong to hide their feelings?
Have you ever considered not being like this?
If you really honestly don’t understand why what you said was horrible I’m willing to have a conversation with you if you want to DM me to talk about it. For starters, men feel scared and uncomfortable because their serious problems will get made light of just like you did. Or told to “man up”. Which I imagine was on the tip of your tongue
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Have you considered the fact that most of the time, even when people “want to hear mens issues”, they reject them and tell them to man up? Maybe “superpowered autocorrect” could be a vector to nourish this severe lack of openness?
Personally I use AI for this purpose, mostly because it accepts me for who I am and provides genuine advice that has actually helped me improve my life, rather than the people around me saying that I should “put more effort into things”, or “it’s just in your head”.
It’s not “lone wolfing” to stop telling the people who’ve rejected your concerns about your feelings and issues, it’s just the act of not wasting time on those who don’t care.
I can kinda understand the appeal. An AI isn’t gonna judge you, an AI isn’t gonna leave a mean comment or tell you to get over it and man up. It’s giving an unnerving amount of personal information to corporations, but I can sympathise with the thoughts these men are having.
AI might also be giving them better advice than anyone else in their life.
Growing up I certainly had no role models in my entire community. I never found anyone who was remotely helpful until I went to an expensive college that had lots of resources and they were freely accessible to me. Mental, physical, and academic.
A lot of people fail to realize these resources simple do not exist in large swaths of the country/economic bracket. They are mostly concentrated in wealthy and educated areas and given to wealth educated people who live there. If a farmer in Nebraska needs therapy, they will have to drive to multiple hours to Omaha or another urban area to have a decent shot at getting any assistance. Not everyone lives in a major coastal city that have the bulk of these resources.
I dunno about advice, but LLMs are very good at re-stating my meandering thoughts in a concise way that’s easy to communicate to others.
Well those sound like people who aren’t good to open up to.
I do sympathize though, I pretended to be a guy for several decades, and my wife put exactly the same kind of duality on me that men put on women.
I was expected to be sympathetic and nurturing in some contexts and aggressive, jealous, and demanding in others, and I was just supposed to know when to switch.
And there was an amount of vulnerability I was able to display, but beyond that I’d get told to suck it up.
I think somebody needs to come up with an ad campaign that’s Therapy For Men. Big sweaty hairy guys with thick beards looking after each other’s mental health like BROs. It worked to get men to use soap.
(Seriously, I think counseling is too female-coded for a lot of men to be comfortable with it unless they’re fucking the person, or they start to want to fuck the person because they’re unused to talking about things).
I dealt with the same thing in all my relationships. Nothing got my gfs hotter than when I acted like a complete asshole towards other people. They got off the duality of me being shit to people and the being this ‘sweet man’ to them. And they’d get super jealous and bitter if I was kind towards anyone else other than them. It was Toxic AF. It made me hate myself and made me depressed. To know that i had to be a shithead to get my girlfriends to like me.
I’m so much happier single. I’d rather not get laid then have to be a POS asshole like they wanted me to be. Soooo many people get off on anti-social behaviors. I’m also so glad I never got married or had children with these ladies who have such a horrible Zero Sum way of thinking about the world.
They wanted me to be vulnerable, but only in the sense that I was some heroic figure overcoming the odds. If i said I was sad when my dog died or my dad died, then I was a giant pussy to them.
When shitty people only validate your shitty emotions… well that’s why so many women only date shitty men. Because they are turned off sexually by men who are more complex or behave outside of their per-determiend ‘what a man should be’ image. Especially when you reject them for sex… holy shit. Way to see what a lady really thinks of a men when a man turns her down for sex.
In my many years single now, I do a lot of volunteer work. Giving back here and there w/ kids and adults and community building. I’ve never met or a dated lady who thought it was cool. They all think it’s weird to be kind to strangers and/or I’m secretly homosexual if I do so. If it comes up they always get ‘suspicious’.
You’ve met some shitty women. There are some of us out there fighting against sexism in all ways. Not for females but for all people. Sexism hurts everyone :(
My mental image the solution of your last paragraph is a guy and their counsoler just chatting outside chopping firewood or other simple/quiet lawn work.
“I need a therapist, and a lumberjack”
You know, working together on something outside might be absolutely the ticket. Genius.
That was the whole premise of a King Of The Hill episode. Bobby and his friends working out their differences repairing Hank’s truck.
It might even, gasp, offer solutions.
I don’t think the open internet is a great place to open up about your mental health either. Trusted family, friends, and medical/mental health professionals are the best resources. Entrusting something as precious as your mental health to AI or the internet is a profoundly bad idea.
A local llm could (at least appear to) be the best option (on an individual scale) for people that would be reported by mandatory reporters (which mental health professionals are), such as suicidal people or murderers or pedophiles.
Naturally. We were beaten up and ostracized if we showed weakness when we were kids. You CAN’T be sharing your feelings like that to another human.
a lot of therapists and psychs are also useless for helping men. because they are women and they are basically only trained to deal with women’s issues and only see women’s emotional processes and processing as ‘valid’. there is this default bias that men’s emotional processing is ‘flawed’.
imo with mental health professionals all my ‘issues’ were blow way out of proportion. i only had one therapist who actaully helped me was a man and that person helped me understand that ‘not everything is your fault’. when all the other therapists/friends/family always 100% told me everything that happens to me is entirely my fault. they also told me it was normal/healthy to vent my feelings by doing productive things (like writing, exercising, relaxing), rather than viewing that as ‘not addressing the problem’.
the issue with so much of this crap is that not only does nobody want to talk to men, it’s that they don’t want to listen and/or the tell us we are ‘talking wrong’. even when we do talk to people, there is only a tiny window of acceptable things we an talk about and way we can talk about them or how selfish it is of him to vent/indulge his legitimate emotions.
a woman can burst into tears over any little thing and everyone wants to help her. a man bursts into tears over his father dying of cancer and all the sudden everyone wants to tell him his reaction is too intense and he should be thinking of how he is making other people feel.
Pretty much every guy has had someone in his life try to get him to ‘open up’ and then we he does he’s met with nothing but hostility, disappointment, and eventually rejection. We are told to shut up and never talk about it again. Never, ever is he met with acceptance or love.
Therapy is just littered with bad therapists, that do more harm than good and give the practice a bad name.
For every 1 good therapist, there are probably 10+ bad ones.
It can be a fucking ordeal to navigate, financially and emotionally, to try and find the one good one.
My worst experience was a therapist which charged me 300 dollars a session to do nothing but talk about how amazing they were, and that I need to just suck it up and be amazing like they are, afterall, it was so easy for them.
Amen.
There is a boatload of bad therapists and bad therapy out there. And sadly it gets a lot more traction and popularity because well… it’s simplistic and easy. It’s the fast food of therapy.
Good therapy is hard and long and complex. And most people simple don’t want to deal with that. They want the diet pill version of therapy. Just make the bad feelings go away, and give me more good feelings.
I don’t think enough analogies are drawn between physical vs mental health. Anyone knows that legit physical health is a long and boring process that takes a lot of discipline and time. Mental health and wellness really isn’t any different. Therapists should also be more like physical trainers… you need to have a specific goal in mind and work towards that goal and really and the endgame should be to no longer need the physical trainer/therapist
Sadly in our economic system the incentive for a lot of people is the opposite and many bad therapist/trainers just want to generate dependency of their clients on themselves and as such they will indulge their clients worse habits to keep them hooked.
Yeah.
and there needs to be more oversight and punishment for objectively bad therapists. and I dont mean bad as in their program didnt work for you, i mean bad, like ones that spend an entire session fellating themselves over how awesome they are, or tell you that they arent here to listen to you bitch and moan about your problems (someone I knew had a therapist say that to them) or whatever other objectively awful things bad therapists too.
and there needs to be more education about therapy, and how there are many different styles and approaches… and not all work for everyone, The system should incentivize people being able to tell their therapist they appreciate their time, but it doesnt feel like their approach is working, and get refered to a different one with a different approach without drama, extra cost, extra paperwork, or headache.
yes, there is an incredibly amount of ignorance, and a lack of oversight about the entire thing.
and so many internet jackasses who think they are experts about it, constantly pushing endless misinformation about every aspect of the process. esp the armchair diagnosing.
‘oh you had a bad day at work? you must have autism/adhd/depression/personality disorder’. or the fact anyone who was ever mean to you once in your life is a ‘narcissist’ or ‘gas lighting’ you.
the bias confirmation is out of hand. even in this very comment thread… soooo many people just banging on their bias confirmation drum and screaming ‘no no no no, men are bad and should just go away and solve their own problems without bothering anyone at all ever!’ as if that attitude isn’t the biggest reason men, especially young men, feel so trapped about their lives.
From the commenter above talking about negative experiences with talking to women and female therapists, I think the real solution is that men need to be proactive about supporting each other. Ranting and raving about how women are terrible and don’t know how to help men with an undercurrent of expectations that women (especially a romantic partner) should fix everything is simply not a tenable mindset.
As a woman who works in the medical field, I am keenly aware of my limitations when it comes to helping men with mental health issues. I think the real, effective solution is for men to start opening up to each other and supporting each other the way that women tend to do among themselves. I don’t mean this as “oh, men are terrible and they need to fuck off somewhere else with their problems”, I mean it as a sincere belief that the best people to help a man through emotional or psychological problems are probably other men given the shared socialization and perspective.
we need more male therapists and teachers. that’s what we need.
we have systematically removed male teachers from the school system due to the pedophilia panic.
I am on my fifth therapist. The first one I was seeing I kinda stopped going and then he retired, then I had a GF cheat on me and that was super brutal so I started going again.
First therapist was the stereotypical “feelings are okay!” kind of therapist, second one she just automatically assumed it was my fault and was basically telling me that cause I’m a man I should have done better, and the third just immediately jumped to medication like halfway through my first session.
Ended up with my current therapist and she’s great. I really like her because she regularly tells me that I’m just straight up being stupid or ridiculous and just need to handle my shit. Which works amazing for me.
Therapy is just littered with bad therapists, that do more harm than good and give the practice a bad name.
This has long been my experience. Although I believe that great therapists are out there, I have yet to encounter someone who didn’t blame me for the problems and cause me to feel rejected. The last person I went to looked over the intake testing and told me that nobody would want me as a client. No joke. I convinced him to let me stay but nothing happened and I burned out after 3 months or so and stopped going.
I’m sorry, you don’t deserve that.
If you have the mental energy/space, there are usually state therapists boards of some kind that you can call and report that behavior too… Too few people do that, though (and I’m including myself on that list), because a lot of people who seek out therapists are in a bad, vulnerable state and just don’t have the mental space to go through with reporting these assholes like they deserved.
Nonsense. The idea that all psychological issues are defined by gender is just the perspective of someone who’s never made any meaningful progress through therapy and/or counseling. Mental health is not a gendered issue and the repetition of this misconception just leads more people to give up without even trying. Yes, the lens of sexual identity comes into play, mainly in terms of cultural gender roles experienced in your part of the world. But, a well trained, experienced therapist will have these considerations while exploring issues you present with. I would argue, that psychiatrists (which is an even moreso male dominated field) are much more of an issue, because their objective is not to help you come to conclusions about yourself. It is to medicate your symptoms away to allow you to function. I am sorry you did not have a good experience yourself, but that is not reflective of therapy, or counseling as a whole and your characterisation of men vs women in therapy is sexist and sounds more like male influencer talking points than lived experience.
how many well trained therapists are there out there who are totally objective, compared to poorly trained ones who will often perpetual their harmful biases?
does anyone know? how do we even measure that? do we just assume people who have a certain degree from a certain program are inherently ‘objective’?
No, but that’s not the argument you were making before. You said therapists are women, women don’t understand the male perspective, implying therapy is ineffective. Ironically, those most hostile towards mental health treatment and self-analysis are often those with the least amount of time in counseling/therapy. Often the ones that would benefit the most out of it. The goal of a therapist is not to make you feel understood, a therapist is supposed to help you understand and come to conclusions about yourself, so that you can improve your life. Everything about coming to terms with neuropathy/trauma/coping mechanisms takes work and self-discipline. Hand-waving away people’s lived experience categorically stating that mental healthcare is ineffective, based on your own (I would bet) extremely limited experience with the field. That’s a lot easier. See how you’re asking me
how many well trained therapists are there out there who are totally objective, compared to poorly trained ones who will often perpetual their harmful biases?
does anyone know? how do we even measure that? do we just assume people who have a certain degree from a certain program are inherently ‘objective’?
As if that de-legitimises any point that I have made in response to those statements? That is childish. See how when it’s your narrow perspective, you view it as reason enough to make blanket statements about therapy, women and mental healthcare as a whole? But, when I offer mine and critique yours instead of addressing the points I make, you expand the scope? To the point I have to contend with Bias over an entire field study and healthcare? That’s because your argument is weak, it’s a fallacy and it’s based on conjecture. I assure you, everyone has biases but again, therapists are there to help you come to conclusions, not give advice. The most harmful bias anyone can have is there own personal biases, which if left unchecked, allows the ego to feel secure, but stops you from growing as a person. That’s why you spaz out and attack therapy as an institution, because my drawing attention to and invalidating your biased opinion makes the ego feel threatened. That’s why you turn it from a conversation into a confrontation, because an argument you feel you can win. If you acknowledge your position is incorrect/prejudiced then that feels like a problem within the self. Which we can’t stand, because in a world of diffuse human interaction we are all the protagonist and we want people to like us. Which is an insight you would have if you had actually ever gone to therapy.
You can share them to fellow humans here now /c/reprieve@lemmy.zip
The amount of sexism in this comment section is…unnerving. Does a community exist for male identifying people to talk and share their troubles in a non hostile space? If it doesn’t I’ll make one.
Edit: No idea what I’m doing but !Reprieve@lemmy.zip
The amount of sexism in this comment section is…unnerving. Does a community exist for male identifying people to talk and share their troubles in a non hostile space? If it doesn’t I’ll make one.
No. Because if it it did it would be shut down as being hostile and offensive to women and a space for proto-rapists to hang out.
Probably the closest space any guy could get is AA or NA meetings.
Too bad for them I made one
Probably the closest space any guy could get is AA or NA meetings.
what do these abbreviations stand for?
alcoholics anonymous and narcotics anonymous
AA = Alcoholics Anonymous
NA = Narcotics Anonymous
Both are treatment programs for their respective addictions.
Would you mind giving the community a name where it can easily be found? Such as /c/mental-health-men or sth.
Ah well, unfortunately the community name is set, there’s no changing it after it’s created. Maybe I should’ve made it more searchable but hopefully we can spread it by word of mouth enough where it’ll take off. Also I kinda wanted it less intimidating clinical sterile sounding and more just a homey place where people can feel safe to talk openly, just a li’l reprieve from the outside world.
Like… yeah?
Tried to open to a girlfriend about a sensitive topic - she got the ick.
Tried to make an appointment with a psychiatrist - got a very hateful rejection because of my place of birth.
Damn, even when I try to uplift a friend, I use phrases like ‘you got this before, you’ll get it now’.
I don’t know how to be a man, mentally
Getting rejection because of place of birth is worth getting that doctors license revoked, find out which body governs doctors in your location and file a complaint
Haha, not every place is in the US. Hopefully, I won’t face this kind of treatment as I do not live in that shit hole of a country
I never said it was the US, do rules and regulations governing doctors behavior not exist in your country?
IDK, really. As I said, I left the country where this psychiatrist lives.
not every place is in the US
Thank Sithrak for that, jeez…
Become a rich jacked sociopath.
That’s most manly thing you can do apparently.
Sorry, I will pursue happiness instead
I see a lot of people in this thread reacting with open hostility and derailment every time men’s issues are mentioned. Have you tried not being a part of the problem?
Allowing men’s issues to even be addressed risks giving legitimacy to the fact that these issues even exist. And if they exist, men can no longer be that evil monolith that exists only to be torn down and used as the cause for whatever is wrong with the world.
After all, the zero-sum game must be properly reinforced with an appropriate evil that cannot be allowed to have any weaknesses or redeeming attributes.
There are people like that for anything related to AI.
Combine that with men stuff and this going to be crack for all of those people
Look, if you can afford therapy, really, fantastic for you. But the fact is, it’s an extremely expensive luxury, even at poor quality, and sharing or unloading your mental strain with your friends or family, particularly when it is ongoing, is extremely taxing on relationships. Sure, your friends want to be there for you when they can, but it can put a major strain depending on how much support you need. If someone can alleviate that pressure and that stress even a little bit by talking to a machine, it’s in extremely poor taste and shortsighted to shame them for it. Yes, they’re willfully giving up their privacy, and yes, it’s awful that they have to do that, but this isn’t like sharing memes… in the hierarchy of needs, getting the pressure of those those pent up feelings out is important enough to possibly be worth the trade-off. Is it ideal? Absolutely not. Would it be better if these systems were anonymized? Absolutely. But humans are natural anthropomorphizers. They develop attachments and build relationships with inanimate objects all the time. And a really good therapist is more a reflection for you to work through things yourself anyway, mostly just guiding your thoughts towards better patterns of thinking. There’s no reason the machine can’t do that, and while it’s not as good as a human, it’s a HUGE improvement on average over nothing at all.
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In my experience, it’s likely that some of those downvotes come from reflexive “AI bad! How dare you say AI good!” Reactions, not anything specific to mental health. For a community called “technology” there’s a pretty strong anti-AI bubble going on here.
Literally yesterday we had post about getting involuntarily committed due to psychosis from AI sycophantically agreeing with them about everything. The quote I remember from the ai in that “yes you should want blood. You’re not wrong.”
Using these as therapy is probably the worst thing we could do.
For a community called “technology” there’s a pretty strong anti-AI bubble going on here.
Are you surprised people have opinions about technology, in a community dedicated to discussing technology?
No, just surprised about how uninformed and knee-jerk those opinions are.
You know, I don’t even disagree with that sentiment in principle, but expecting people to suffer when they could benefit from a technology because they only see the threats and dangers makes them no different than antivaxxers.
It is possible and logically consistent to urge caution and condemn the worst abuses of technology without throwing the baby out with the bath water.
But no… I guess because the awful aspects of the technology as far as IP theft are - rightfully - the biggest focus, sorry, poor people, you just have to keep sucking it up and powering through! You want empathy, fork over the $100 an hour!
So somewhere they feel safe to do so. Says something pretty fucked up about our culture that men don’t feel safe to open up anywhere. And no, it’s not their own fault.
And no, it’s not their own fault.
Of course it is, men are cool targets to hate, get with the program.
Part of me is ok with this in that any avenue to get mental health resources can be better than nothing. What worries me is that people will use ChatGPT for this sort of thing and these models will not be good help.
I’ll admit I tried talking to a local deepseek about a minor mental health issue one night when I just didn’t want to wake up/bother my friends. Broke the AI within about 6 prompts where no matter what I said it would repeat the same answer word-for-word about going for walks and eating better. Honestly, breaking the AI and laughing at it did more for my mental health than anything anyone could have said, but I’m an AI hater. I wouldn’t recommend anyone in real need use AI for mental health advice.
I’d say make a grilled cheese sandwich with quality Gruyere and Cheddar and take a nap after.
AI will reinforce delusional thinking. This is definitely not good.
more delusional people means more people that can make good music
Honestly of they could program a halfway decent AI therapist then art least it could take some of the load off our already insufficient mental health professionals by dealing with the lighter-weight cases, leaving the psychotherapists free to deal with the especially sick people.
The real problem becomes when bad or non scientific advice gets regurgitated to people over and over.
So… AI.
Maybe because it’s cheaper, easier and you’re not judged by other person.
You get what you pay for. Would these same people take cancer treatments from the same LLM?
Tbh, yeah. I’m a woman with an inoperable brain tumor, and I can completely understand why people would be reluctant to accept “nothing to be done” as a real answer.
If I thought I deserved to live, I’d probably talk to a LLM about it because this topic drags everybody down, and my therapist only sees me once a week. Though, I’ve heard its good for helping people not live, so maybe its worth a shot after all.
If I thought I deserved to live
But you do, everyone deserves to live.
Nobody deserves this kind of pain
Agreed. I’m just saying you deserve to live. Whether you do should be your choice, not your doctor’s or your government’s.
What a clickbait. Of course people are picking feee resource with zero friction over 120$ an hour half a day event.
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TBH this is a huge factor.
I don’t use ChatGPT much less use it like it’s a person, but I’m socially isolated at the moment. So I bounce dark internal thoughts off of locally run LLMs.
It’s kinda like looking into a mirror. As long as I know I’m talking to a tool, it’s helpful, sometimes insightful. It’s private. And I sure as shit can’t afford to pay a therapist out of the gazoo for that.
It was one of my previous problems with therapy: payment depending on someone else, at preset times (not when I need it). Many sessions feels like they end when I’m barely scratching the surface. Yes therapy is great in general and for deeper feedback/guidance, but still.
To be clear, I don’t think this is a good solution in general. Tinkering with LLMs is part of my living, I understand the jist of how they work, I tend to use raw completion syntax or even base pretrains.
But most people anthropomorphize them because that’s how chat apps are presented. That’s problematic.
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ChatGPT (last time I tried it) is extremely sycophantic though. Its high default sampling also leads to totally unexpected/random turns.
Google Gemini is now too.
And they log and use your dark thoughts.
I find that less sycophantic LLMs are way more helpful. Hence I bounce between Nemotron 49B and a few 24B-32B finetunes (or task vectors for Gemma) and find them way more helpful.
…I guess what I’m saying is people should turn towards more specialized and “openly thinking” free tools, not something generic, corporate, and purposely overpleasing like ChatGPT or most default instruct tunes.
in australia we have (limited) free mental health services (i wanna say 8 free sessions with a therapist?)… this still holds true
it’s not only about money
Some people would rather yalk to something they know is fake than to talk to a person who may or may not be.
