An AI therapist can’t really do therapy. Many clients will choose it anyway.

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Woman working on laptop in an apartment window / Photo by Matthew Henry via Burst / Used under licenseIt just isnā€™t the same, I hear over and over, from psychotherapists shrugging away concern over artificial intelligence. An AI therapist canā€™t really empathize. It canā€™t truly understand. It canā€™t build a therapeutic relationship with depth and connectedness the way a human therapist can.

As a therapist myself, I agree with all of these statements. An AI therapist is not equivalent to a human therapist. Like many therapists, I tend to focus on the ways that AI falls short.

But for clients, in many ways, an AI therapist is better than a human one. 

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AI therapy is about to make therapy a lot cheaper

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Hands on laptop / Photo by Matthew Henry via Burst / Used under licenseā€œIā€™m in L.A. We have a lot of therapists,ā€ Angelle Haney Gullett told the Washington Post in 2022. ā€œSo itā€™s just kind of wild to me that that many people are at capacity.ā€ She had contacted 25 different therapists after her father passed away, knowing that she needed help. Even though she was willing to pay cash, not one would take her. No one would even put her on a waiting list.

Sheā€™s not alone. Tens of thousands of Americans struggle to access mental health care even when they know they need it, and even when their health insurance covers it. But for clients like Angelle, mental health care is about to get much easier to access. Itā€™s about to get a lot less expensive, too. This will happen thanks to artificial intelligence. AI therapy is already here, and it’s about to upend US mental health care.

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