Therapists who are human beings often have ideological biases that can harm their patients. A possible solution is to use a chatbot with artificial intelligence as your therapist, instead of going to a leftist psychologist. “Researchers at Dartmouth College recently published the results of the first-ever clinical trial of AI therapy. The trial involved 210 participants who were randomly assigned to a 4-week program with Therabot, a generative AI chatbot trained on a curated dataset of therapeutic conversations….patients with depression, anxiety, or an eating disorder reported an average symptom reduction of 51 percent, 31 percent, and 19 percent, respectively,” reports The Doomslayer.
Dartmouth College explains,
Dartmouth researchers conducted the first-ever clinical trial of a generative AI-powered therapy chatbot and found that the software resulted in significant improvements in participants’ symptoms, according to results published March 27 in NEJM AI.
People in the study also reported they could trust and communicate with the system, known as Therabot, to a degree that is comparable to working with a mental health professional.
The trial consisted of 106 people from across the United States diagnosed with major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, or an eating disorder. Participants interacted with Therabot through a smartphone app by typing out responses to prompts about how they were feeling or initiating conversations when they needed to talk.
People diagnosed with depression experienced a 51% average reduction in symptoms, leading to clinically significant improvements in mood and overall well-being…
Participants with generalized anxiety reported an average reduction in symptoms of 31%, with many shifting from moderate to mild anxiety, or from mild anxiety to below the clinical threshold for diagnosis.
Among those at risk for eating disorders—who are traditionally more challenging to treat—Therabot users showed a 19% average reduction in concerns about body image and weight, which significantly outpaced a control group that also was part of the trial.
If you are depressed and need a shrink, a chatbot may be the best option, and the best way of avoiding a left-wing therapist who will harm your mental health.
Ideology is making some therapists dangerous to their patients, explains psychiatrist Sally Satel:
Until roughly five years ago, people seeking mental health care could expect their therapists to keep politics out of the office. But as counselor education programs and professional organizations across the country embrace a radical social justice agenda, that bedrock principle of neutrality is crumbling. Mental health professionals—mainly counselors and therapists—are increasingly replacing evidence-driven therapeutics with ideologically motivated practice and activism.
The Graduate Counseling Program at the University of Vermont, for example, intends to “structurally align” itself with the Black Lives Matter movement and begin “the work of undoing systemic white supremacy.” After George Floyd’s death, the Johns Hopkins University Counseling Center advised would-be students to “consider us one of many resources in the difficult but necessary work of engaging with internalized bias, recognizing privilege, and aligning values of anti-racism and allyship with embodied and sustained practice.”
Such sentiments are not limited to mission statements—they are playing out in the real world of clinical training. Some counseling programs encourage students to engage in social justice activism. Most troubling of all, trainees are being taught to see patients not as individuals with unique needs, but as avatars of their gender, race, and ethnic groups. Accordingly, more and more counselors encourage their patients to understand their problems as a consequence of an oppressive society. White patients, for instance, are told that their distress stems from their subjugation of others, while black and minority patients are told that their problems stem from being oppressed.
The stakes for patients are high. When therapists use patients as receptacles for their worldview, patients are not led to introspection, nor are they emboldened to experiment with new attitudes, perspectives, and actions. Patients labeled by their therapists as oppressors can feel alienated and confused; those branded as oppressed learn to see themselves as feeble victims….
