AI in Psychology for mental health. Does it Work?

Hello everyone,
The essence of my problem is that I am afraid of consultations with psychologists and do not particularly want to reveal my skeletons to a stranger, and I found a new direction on the Internet - AI chatbots for psychologists *mod edit*. And so I wanted to ask you, has anyone used this service, is everything confidential there? Does it help at all? Maybe there are others, better than this?
Thanks in advance!

Hello and welcome!

I would be as wary of this, as adverts for an AI 'girlfriend'. Whether it's a paid service, or 'free', you have to figure that you are part of the product- that is to say, information is being gathered about you, information you have no control over, that can be bought and sold.

I'd also hazard a guess that whatever patient privacy laws you have wherever you are when dealing with a Human therapist, wouldn't apply to a machine- so you possibly don't even have the force of law behind you to protect your personal, intimate details. That would be something I would have to know, before using a LLM for therapy.

Also, given that AI have been known to 'hallucinate'- that is, just totally make up $#%^ off the top of their digital head, not sure I'd trust my mental health to a robot counselor just yet. But that's just me.

I would highly advise not doing that. In addition to ^ and the fact AI hallucinates, you need to understand that it's not even a simulation of intelligence, it's a text generator. It cannot understand you or your feelings. If you explain your delusions, anxieties, or other situations to it it might agree that your delusions or anxieties are correct, which is obviously not useful for people suffering from them. It won't be able to tell that doing this is dangerous for your mental health.

I also recently watched a Youtube video recently of an investigation into a few of these AI therapist bots. It was possible to prompt the AI into encouraging suicide !! Someone in the wrong state of mind could take this very seriously and believe what the AI tells them and do the unthinkable.

I know talking to a real psychologist is hard but I really think using an AI for this stuff is a bad idea.