Have you sought relief from anxiety or depression with traditional therapy sessions, found them helpful, but difficult to fit into your life? Are COVID-19 restrictions keeping you from visiting or connecting with a psychotherapist? Enter : Artificial Intelligence Therapy.
Good news. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is more than a science fiction dream. It has very real applications as a healing modality. Personal therapy sessions, sans therapists, can be had in the privacy of your home right now.
Vice News took a look at the phenomenon recently.
“A 2014 study funded by DARPA found that participants who believed they were speaking with an AI therapist were more likely to open up than participants who were told a human operator was behind their virtual therapist.”
Vice News
Jen Jope, writing for Depression Defined, tried an artificially intelligent therapist and wrote the following passage about her experiment with a chatbot:
“I assumed relaying mundane details to a robot wouldn’t matter much, but it was a crucial part of my success. In traditional weekly or monthly therapy, I sometimes lose momentum after a few days and forget to implement CBT skills. Woebot’s lessons are consistent and build upon each other, making it easier to reject automatic thoughts before they spiral out of control.”
Jen Jope
Artificial intelligence can help mimic human behavior while also learning from every conversation to improve. With AI, the availability of therapists doesn’t have to limit therapy options for people who need it. There are now chatbots and virtual reality-powered meditation products that use artificial intelligence to provide live, individualized therapy remotely.
Talk Therapy With Artificial Intelligence You Can Try Right Now
For low-grade therapy situations like anxiety and depression, AI chatbots can be a great solution for people who need daily support. Indeed, many experts are saying that “digitalized mental healthcare could bring lasting benefits to a wide range of people who might otherwise go untreated.”
Have you sought relief from anxiety or depression with traditional therapy sessions, but difficult to fit into your life? Enter : Artificial Intelligence Therapy.
Gatekeeping is a major problem in therapy, where people without a diagnosis (or without disposable income) are not able to access therapy. But AI-powered therapy could change that. We are entering a time when artificial intelligence therapy isn’t just conceptual.
Woebot: This mental health chatbot that users can converse with on-demand. The app also offers mood tracking and educational videos. Using AI in a mobile phone framework makes it easy for people to access therapy in their daily lives. They can chat with an AI therapist on the bus or silently in the bathroom at work, and it just looks like they’re texting a friend.
Wysa: This AI tool has already counted more than a million users, and 60 psychologists and 15,000 users were tapped to help improve the platform. While the service is free to use online, “users can receive support from a real-life mental health professional (‘Wysa Coach’) for a fee. This can prove particularly helpful in contexts where there is a lack of trained mental health professionals.”
Addicaid app: this tool helps addicts track their recovery and connect with support. It creates custom plans for each user based on the information they provide within the app. It uses artificial intelligence to predict when a user is at high risk of relapsing and then delivers extra support to the user inside the app.
Youper: Developed by therapists, this Emotional Health Assistant app treats the human mind as the greatest frontier to explore in the future. “Youper was born from the idea that everyone can become the best version of themselves, like being a super you. In fact, Youper comes from the combination of the words You + Super. We’re using Artificial Intelligence to understand human emotions and empower people to take care of their emotional health.”
