Can AI Help Us With Our Mental Health Issues?
Recently I finished reading Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Very Short Introduction. (As some of you know, I have been reading hundreds of these VSI books for years.) In a nutshell, and the way I understand it, CBT is a psychotherapeutic technique that helps people overcome psychological problems by deliberately changing their mental perspective on the world and their response to it. It’s a way of learning how to think differently about your problems, and hopefully shift your emotional and cognitive perspective. CBT is primarily used with people with depression and anxiety, and it has shown a lot of success with treating those psychopathologies.
Unlike some other more famous psychotherapeutic techniques, CBT is well researched and has been vetted using proper scientific methodologies. Research on its effectiveness has show both the promises and the limitations of CBT. It seems that in order to be fully effective, especially with the more difficult problems, CBT needs to be used frequently and over a prolonged period of time. Unfortunately, that level of commitment is very hard to sustain, and even harder to get proper therapists for. According to many estimates, at least a third of all people in most Western countries now suffer from some level of depression and anxiety. Scaling CBT to reach even a tiny fraction of that population is beyond any reasonable hope.
This is where I think that Generative AI could be of help. There have already been many attempts to create realistic personal interlocutors with GenAI. Many of them were cringe, and some of them were downright concerning, but the overall ability of these AI agents to act as plausible conversation partners is indisputable. Yes, there are still issues with the reliability and trustworthiness of GenAI, but these concerns are continuously being worked on and addressed. I believe that GenAI can do for mental health what smartwatches have been doing for our physical health - enable and improve our ability to track and asses our mental health states and in many case guide us to improve that aspect of our wellbeing. If this comes to pass, it could be one of the most indisputably beneficial aspects of the use of AI to benefit humanity.