AI therapy

 In an advert that is currently pursuing me around YouTube, a young woman who is holding an iPhone and a heavily customised iced coffee sits alone in her car in an empty car park somewhere and urges me to download a therapy app so I can unburden myself of my woes...

The obligatory response to the cultural dominance of therapy is to laud the new atmosphere of "awareness" about mental illness and the destigmatisation of its treatment. And I duly laud it. But I am also compelled to register my scepticism that a lonely young woman confessing her unhappiest thoughts to her smartphone in a vacant car park is a vision of mental health utopia. Ours is at once a rigorously therapised society and an unprecedently lonely one.

Therapy has boomed in the 21st  per cent century: between 2017 and 2021 participation increased by 25% in Britain. At the same time the number of people reporting that they have no friends has risen consistently. The last time the public was polled, one in ten reported having no close friends. Among millennials, 27% say they have no close friends and 22 per cent have no friends at all.

And so, with sinister efficiency, corporations are moving in to meet the demand. In lieu of a friend to hear your confession, you can pay for a virtual therapist or, more dystopically, an AI one. Almost half of therapy sessions in the UK are now remote, taking place over Zoom, through an app or with a bot...

Mesmeric Therapy
French School (attributed  to)
Photo Credit: Wellcome Collection [Public Domain]

To a lonely generation raised on social media and accustomed to the "parasocial" relationships with YouTubers, podcasters and influencers that characterise life online, real connections can be replaced only too easily by ersatz digital alternatives...

That we are the sole authors of our destinies and that self-expression is the highest goal to which a person can aspire are notions that carry quasi-Biblical authority in the modern West...

We don't like to remember how powerless and irrelevant we really are. Our lives are determined less by will than by economic and social forces outside our control... In such an unforgiving world, the idea that all life's solutions can be found within is a precarious path to contentment...

The image of an isolated person confessing her unhappiness to a chatbot is an unimpeachably bleak symbol of 21st-century solipsism. It is also a testament to the power of one of the most persistent myths in Western culture: that fulfillment and success are to be found within ourselves. It is false, of course. For all the undoubted benefits of therapy, truth and happiness are ultimately found in other people. In our friends and in the people we love.

(James Marriott, The Times, 2024)

"For all the undoubted benefits of therapy" - I may well quibble with this and ask why there has been such a large rise in the number seeking therapy but the author of this article certainly raises some interesting counter propositions to the prevailing orthodoxy within Western culture.