A profound relational revolution is underway, not orchestrated by tech developers but driven by users themselves. Many of the 400 million weekly users of ChatGPT are seeking more than just assistance with emails or information on food safety; they are looking for emotional support.
“Therapy and companionship” have emerged as two of the most frequent applications for generative AI globally, according to the Harvard Business Review. This trend marks a significant, unplanned pivot in how people interact with technology.
So somewhere they feel safe to do so. Says something pretty fucked up about our culture that men don’t feel safe to open up anywhere. And no, it’s not their own fault.
I wouldn’t use AI but I certainly don’t have anyone to open up to really. Either they’d use what I tell them against me or just aren’t in a position to offer any real support. With my luck I’d end up institutionalized for saying some unhinged shit anyway.
And no, it’s not their own fault.
Of course it is, men are cool targets to hate, get with the program.
I can kinda understand the appeal. An AI isn’t gonna judge you, an AI isn’t gonna leave a mean comment or tell you to get over it and man up. It’s giving an unnerving amount of personal information to corporations, but I can sympathise with the thoughts these men are having.
An AI isn’t gonna judge you,
Guess what is happening with that chat history?
Alternate title “Men so starved of sources of support they resort to talking to AI”
Or “men would rather talk to superpowered autocorrect rather than sharing their feelings with family and friends”
This response is why men feel scared and uncomfortable opening up. You are a part of the problem. For your male family members’ sake, I hope you check in on them instead of just being sexist online.
Men feel scared and uncomfortable because they’re afraid to be told they were wrong to hide their feelings?
If you really honestly don’t understand why what you said was horrible I’m willing to have a conversation with you if you want to DM me to talk about it. For starters, men feel scared and uncomfortable because their serious problems will get made light of just like you did. Or told to “man up”. Which I imagine was on the tip of your tongue
Have you ever considered not being like this?
probably not but that’s because sexism against men is normalized and you’re not allowed to talk about it unless you’re a neonazi for some reason.
side note, this is exactly why the “young broccoli haired boy to fascist brownshirt” pipeline exists. they have real and genuine issues and instead of getting any sort of community or support virtually every facet of society is telling them their issues are fake and that they are destined to be monsters. then someone like j peterson comes along and tells them “life isn’t so bad, it’s okay, just clean your room and be disciplined, it’ll all start to look up soon champ… and uh… also hate the gays, black people, and other minorities - they’re the woke mob that left you abandoned like this!” people making shocked pikachu face at young men being hardcore MAGAts are so sorely out of touch with what being a man is like and the kinds of trauma that can stem from the male experience. it’s obvious to most of us why this issue exists, i hope. this comment chain is a great example. if you even touch the topic you get barraged with people telling you to essentially shut the fuck up and stop entertaining the idea that men are possibly people too and not some root of all fucking evil in the world.
the amount of literal hate I see towards men in casual discourse is insane. can say the most psychotic shit in most circles nowadays but if you point your malice at the “right kinds” of people most won’t even bat an eye. see people frequently talking about doing unhinged shit to others solely because they are a man or [insert other group they don’t like generally for some stupid fucking reason] and there is a preconceived slight, danger, or aggression. leftists think they’re better people morally but we’re really not. i have seen the exact same bullshit bigotry promulgate every community i know of in the past few years. the same brainrot the conservatives have had since the tea partiers has infiltrated our spaces too. everyone genuinely is dumb, angry, and hateful now.
I am not wholly convinced that our culture being the target of multiple astroturfing campaigns hasn’t degraded people’s capability for nuance, compassion, empathy, and ontology.
I’m here to talk if you need an ear man, I understand you and it sounds like you’ve been through your own personal brand of shit
appreciate the offer king. i might check in and occasionally participate in the comm, i like the idea.
my main concern is ensuring there isn’t a weird invasion of the space by neofascists. that’s the main issue with men’s rights spaces currently. it doesn’t seem easy to prevent as every such space i come across has this problem. the exact thing we identify as hating here pervades spaces trying to tackle this problem… something of a catch 22.
i fucking adore the naming, tho. reprieve is exactly what we all need. i think you should really lean into the abandonment of identity and related identity politics for this community. it shouldn’t be about men in particular, it’s about a reprieve from this shitty contemporary world we have grown up into. after all, race or sex or whatever aren’t even real… they’re just arbitrary lines that cultures draw upon the world. important to individuals maybe, yes, but i’ve always felt it to be something of an albatross around the left’s neck. not all right-wing criticisms of “identity politics” are necessarily unwarranted… (😬 oopsie i broke the groupthink too hard that time guys o nooooos 🙈)
.
amen to all this. i really started removing ‘leftists’ people from my life and it was like… so much better because so much of their entity message is just this weird revenge/hate pron against straight white men, and men in general. when ironically, the people they should be angry at are the wealthy… but honestly most of these ‘leftists’ I’ve known were trust fund kids… so that tells you right there why they would never rag on the wealthy…
normal well adjusted people don’t hate anyone or blame anyone for their problems. but for some reason it’s become mainstream A-OK to say horrible awful shit about men that would you get you banned/shitcanned/ostracized if you said ti about anyone else. esp in liberal/left groupthink.
it’s entire the same discourse as neoNazis and all that too… just replace jew/black with white straight men.
this sort of stuff gets downvoted incessantly in leftist spaces which is a damn shame bc i feel like a lot of these places are my home to a certain degree. it makes me feel unwelcome. ik that’s like, the fucking point and why they do it but still.
these sorts of people are just on some weird, misguided, revanchist agenda that necessitates getting “revenge” on certain groups of people instead of sticking with the core principles of the ideology which clearly state that you should kindly refrain from being an asshole. there is nothing to be gained from exacting some revenge fantasy upon straight white men. you’re exactly right, the only people who deserve to have shit flung their way over who they are is the rich and powerful.
yeah they are definitely making dumb choices. it’s probably not because they’re all just dumb though. they probably have a lot of external factors pushing them towards that decision.
for example, many discussions tend to find ways to blame and shame them instead of responding with empathy. sort of like this comment. what benefit do you think you get by reframing things to blame the men here?
Almost like questioning an AI is free while a therapist costs a LOT of money.
I think there’s a lot more to it than cost. Men, even with considerable health care resources, are often very averse to mental health care.
Thinking of my father in law, for example, I don’t know how much you would have to pay him to get him into a therapist’s office, but I’m certain he wouldn’t go for free.
There are other causes here.
They’ve been talking for a while about how the low participation in dating by Gen Z women is because they’re tired of being the entire support system for men experiencing a loneliness epidemic.
It’s a lot of pressure for the women to be under, and so they’re withdrawing.
I’m guessing this is one of the driving forces as well. Lack of real, emotionally intimate human connections around them. Many men are quite fucked in that regard right now.
The flip side of that is vast numbers of Gen Z Men saying many Gen Z women are basically misandrists, who asked them to stop interacting with them unprompted, no more unwanted attention… so they did that, they stopped… and now all they see is IG and TikToks of Gen Z Women complaining that no one asks them out on dates anymore, no one is 6’ tall with a 6 figure income becore the age of 30, and willing to worship them as a queen.
I am not saying this is any kind of objectively accurate to whatever degree, but I am saying that this is the very common, general vibe.
So, in that situation: Why bother?
Many men can actually be fulfilled just staying actually single, as in not even dating single, snd getting their own lives, finances, health, to a better place.
Yes this does though also mean that … because we’ve just got less general, face to face socialization going on that… basically a larger than otherwise number of them will basically develop harmful, reinforcing neuroses, in harmful echo chambers… but at the same time, that applies to women as well.
This is what happens when you jam a broad economic collapse up alongside a highly digital and publicized modern media landscape that is tweaked all to fuck to highlight and push the most extreme version of everything… along with extremely mixed messaging that an only digitally socialized person recieves, but all as a firehose, that is very hard to make true sense of.
So… fuck this shit I’m out… social withdrawal… basically becomes a reasonable mental health improving move, even if it does leave you kinda socially stunted as compared to pre-internet generations.
I am not saying this is any kind of objectively accurate to whatever degree, but I am saying that this is the very common, general vibe.
I’m glad you’re not because this is patently false. As soon as you get out of the internet you find young people dating is alive and well.
I mean, to a certain degree this is broadly true.
Like we have the numbers, younger generations are waaaay less likely to have had a relationship or sexual encounter by the same age/stage in their life as compared to previous generations, way more people just are relationship inexperienced.
This goes for both genders/sexes, though it is more prominent with younger men than women.
The overwhelming problem is that in the US, so much in person socialization is expensive, basically pay-gated, paywalled.
There are very few third places you can just hang out at for no cost. Public transit sucks or is non existant, cars are super unaffordable due to collapsing economy, and all our cities are designed for using cars to drive from place to place… so very few places are actually walk-navigable…
Everyone is increasingly overweight and overworked (or over homeworked, for students) and overstressed, so they can’t or don’t engage in group meet up hobbies or sports as much as they used to… and ironically even religiosity levels overall trending down means less people are going to church… all the traditional methods of getting socialization and expanding out a friend network in real life are withering.
So, the easier path is to get your socialization, of all kinds, primarily digitally.
But all those most common and popular ways of doing that are also massively manipulative with algos intentionally feeding you whatever ragebait slop appeals to you, personally.
It is very ironic that, as basically a 90s kid myself, very early tech adopter… my view of the vast majority of social media now is that it is basically a mentally harmful and addictive drug that people need to detox from… but when I tell younger people that, they say things like ‘its not that deep bro, everybody has a (whatever) profile’.
There are lots of studies that show that very common levels of social media app usage… do actually reduce attention spans, spread dangerous misinformation, lower academic performance, cause negative self esteem by way of unrealistic standards, of beauty, lifestyle, wealth… brainrot is real, basically.
Like, I am all for the TikTok ban for kids. But also ban all short form video content for kids. Instagram, Youtube shorts, whatever.
This shit is melting peoples brains, it needs to be treated the same way you’d treat a drug epidemic.
We are now at the point where kids give so little of a fuck, have such tiny attention spans and need for constant, rapid fire stimulation… that half of adult Americans read below a 6th grade level, 20-30% of them read below a 2nd grade level, making them functionally illiterate… and thats just with Gen Z now mostly being in those young adult numbers, its gonna be even worse when Gen Alpha graduates and starts trying to enter society/the workforce.
EDIT:
This isn’t even broadly unprecedented.
Look at Japan.
Hikkikomori.
The stagnant economy becomes overly financialized and corporatized and impossibly demanding… so people just drop out of it, or worse, kill themselves from the stress of trying to live up to its expectations…
And well then yeah, in person socializing broadly drops, relationship dynamics become strained and morph, birth rate plummets.
Give it 5 or 10 years and we’ll have something resembling rent a boyfriend/girlfriend services and maid / stud cafes as well, as the stereotypified fascimile of socialization and having a real relstionship becomes a marketable product, and then industry.
Maybe a few areas will even properly legalize and regulate prostitution.
Granted, that’ll be in any areas that remain even kind of blue.
The red areas will just go full theocrat and send you to jail for masturbating, but also re-legalize child marriage, and rework marriage laws into ‘covenant marriage’, where basically the woman functionally cannot divorce the husband.
In summary: cyberpunk hypercapitalism is in fact very very bad for healthy human relationship dynamics.
because they’re tired of being the entire support system for men experiencing a loneliness epidemic.
I’ve got no horse in this race but it appears that ‘men should not be afraid to open up’ articles and tweets were followed by ‘men, we are not your therapist’.
🤷♂️
I’m a therapist who works almost exclusively with men. Here one pattern I’ve seen often:
- Man is conditioned from a young age not to identify, process or express his feelings
- Man doesn’t share his feelings with anyone - friends, family, partners - for years
- Man sees woman as safe, caring and validating
- Man confides in woman only and continues not sharing feelings with others
- Woman becomes overwhelmed, resentful, dismissive
- Man gets the message that he never should have opened up in the first place
It can be true both that men need to open up more and should not treat their partners as therapists. We all need support systems because no one person can always be available to give us everything we need. It’s not wrong to confide in a partner, but if that partner is the only confidant it’s precarious for both. And I want to emphasize this is not the fault of a man, or men as a community. This is the result of generations of conditioning from both men and women, and both men and women play a part in the solution. I also want to recognize that many of us don’t have a network of people we could open up to even if we wanted to, and many more can’t afford therapy.
If anyone reading this can afford therapy, I highly recommend it. It’s a place to undo some of that conditioning, to sit with someone who’s committed to listening, caring, and not judging.
man is conditioned from a young age not to show feelings
I feel like you skipped over this part way too quickly. Myself and other men have been hearing things like “it’s not manly to cry”, “whining isn’t going to do anything for you”, “being weak is girly”, and countless other things for my entire memorable life
And it’s not just men telling me this. It’s men, women, adults, my classmates, teachers and mentors.
It’s not a good thing. And it’s changing now, which is so good. But man hearing that from your earliest memories makes it really set in.
Also talking to ChatGPT, if done anonymously, won’t ruin your career.
(Thinking of AD military, where they tell you help is available but in reality it will and maybe should cost you your security clearance.)
won’t ruin your career
Granted, but it still will suck a fuck ton of coal produced electricity.
Yeah, but also one of them is helpful and the other is the exact opposite. If the choices are AI therapist or no therapist, you are still better off with no therapist.
that’s easy to say, but when someone is in a crisis, I would be wrong to judge then for talking to an AI (shitty terrible solution) instead of a therapist that can be unaffordable and also comes with a risk of then being terrible.
Got it. No therapist it is.
Naturally. We were beaten up and ostracized if we showed weakness when we were kids. You CAN’T be sharing your feelings like that to another human.
a lot of therapists and psychs are also useless for helping men. because they are women and they are basically only trained to deal with women’s issues and only see women’s emotional processes and processing as ‘valid’. there is this default bias that men’s emotional processing is ‘flawed’.
imo with mental health professionals all my ‘issues’ were blow way out of proportion. i only had one therapist who actaully helped me was a man and that person helped me understand that ‘not everything is your fault’. when all the other therapists/friends/family always 100% told me everything that happens to me is entirely my fault. they also told me it was normal/healthy to vent my feelings by doing productive things (like writing, exercising, relaxing), rather than viewing that as ‘not addressing the problem’.
the issue with so much of this crap is that not only does nobody want to talk to men, it’s that they don’t want to listen and/or the tell us we are ‘talking wrong’. even when we do talk to people, there is only a tiny window of acceptable things we an talk about and way we can talk about them or how selfish it is of him to vent/indulge his legitimate emotions.
a woman can burst into tears over any little thing and everyone wants to help her. a man bursts into tears over his father dying of cancer and all the sudden everyone wants to tell him his reaction is too intense and he should be thinking of how he is making other people feel.
Pretty much every guy has had someone in his life try to get him to ‘open up’ and then we he does he’s met with nothing but hostility, disappointment, and eventually rejection. We are told to shut up and never talk about it again. Never, ever is he met with acceptance or love.
Therapy is just littered with bad therapists, that do more harm than good and give the practice a bad name.
For every 1 good therapist, there are probably 10+ bad ones.
It can be a fucking ordeal to navigate, financially and emotionally, to try and find the one good one.
My worst experience was a therapist which charged me 300 dollars a session to do nothing but talk about how amazing they were, and that I need to just suck it up and be amazing like they are, afterall, it was so easy for them.
Amen.
There is a boatload of bad therapists and bad therapy out there. And sadly it gets a lot more traction and popularity because well… it’s simplistic and easy. It’s the fast food of therapy.
Good therapy is hard and long and complex. And most people simple don’t want to deal with that. They want the diet pill version of therapy. Just make the bad feelings go away, and give me more good feelings.
I don’t think enough analogies are drawn between physical vs mental health. Anyone knows that legit physical health is a long and boring process that takes a lot of discipline and time. Mental health and wellness really isn’t any different. Therapists should also be more like physical trainers… you need to have a specific goal in mind and work towards that goal and really and the endgame should be to no longer need the physical trainer/therapist
Sadly in our economic system the incentive for a lot of people is the opposite and many bad therapist/trainers just want to generate dependency of their clients on themselves and as such they will indulge their clients worse habits to keep them hooked.
Yeah.
and there needs to be more oversight and punishment for objectively bad therapists. and I dont mean bad as in their program didnt work for you, i mean bad, like ones that spend an entire session fellating themselves over how awesome they are, or tell you that they arent here to listen to you bitch and moan about your problems (someone I knew had a therapist say that to them) or whatever other objectively awful things bad therapists too.
and there needs to be more education about therapy, and how there are many different styles and approaches… and not all work for everyone, The system should incentivize people being able to tell their therapist they appreciate their time, but it doesnt feel like their approach is working, and get refered to a different one with a different approach without drama, extra cost, extra paperwork, or headache.
yes, there is an incredibly amount of ignorance, and a lack of oversight about the entire thing.
and so many internet jackasses who think they are experts about it, constantly pushing endless misinformation about every aspect of the process. esp the armchair diagnosing.
‘oh you had a bad day at work? you must have autism/adhd/depression/personality disorder’. or the fact anyone who was ever mean to you once in your life is a ‘narcissist’ or ‘gas lighting’ you.
the bias confirmation is out of hand. even in this very comment thread… soooo many people just banging on their bias confirmation drum and screaming ‘no no no no, men are bad and should just go away and solve their own problems without bothering anyone at all ever!’ as if that attitude isn’t the biggest reason men, especially young men, feel so trapped about their lives.
From the commenter above talking about negative experiences with talking to women and female therapists, I think the real solution is that men need to be proactive about supporting each other. Ranting and raving about how women are terrible and don’t know how to help men with an undercurrent of expectations that women (especially a romantic partner) should fix everything is simply not a tenable mindset.
As a woman who works in the medical field, I am keenly aware of my limitations when it comes to helping men with mental health issues. I think the real, effective solution is for men to start opening up to each other and supporting each other the way that women tend to do among themselves. I don’t mean this as “oh, men are terrible and they need to fuck off somewhere else with their problems”, I mean it as a sincere belief that the best people to help a man through emotional or psychological problems are probably other men given the shared socialization and perspective.
we need more male therapists and teachers. that’s what we need.
we have systematically removed male teachers from the school system due to the pedophilia panic.
I am on my fifth therapist. The first one I was seeing I kinda stopped going and then he retired, then I had a GF cheat on me and that was super brutal so I started going again.
First therapist was the stereotypical “feelings are okay!” kind of therapist, second one she just automatically assumed it was my fault and was basically telling me that cause I’m a man I should have done better, and the third just immediately jumped to medication like halfway through my first session.
Ended up with my current therapist and she’s great. I really like her because she regularly tells me that I’m just straight up being stupid or ridiculous and just need to handle my shit. Which works amazing for me.
Nonsense. The idea that all psychological issues are defined by gender is just the perspective of someone who’s never made any meaningful progress through therapy and/or counseling. Mental health is not a gendered issue and the repetition of this misconception just leads more people to give up without even trying. Yes, the lens of sexual identity comes into play, mainly in terms of cultural gender roles experienced in your part of the world. But, a well trained, experienced therapist will have these considerations while exploring issues you present with. I would argue, that psychiatrists (which is a much more male dominated field) are much more of an issue, because their objective is not to help you come to conclusions about yourself. It is to medicate your symptoms away to allow you to function. I am sorry you did not have a good experience yourself, but that is not reflective of therapy, or counseling as a whole and your characterisation of men vs women in therapy is sexist and sounds more like male influencer talking points than lived experience.
how many well trained therapists are there out there who are totally objective, compared to poorly trained ones who will often perpetual their harmful biases?
does anyone know? how do we even measure that? do we just assume people who have a certain degree from a certain program are inherently ‘objective’?
This is pretty sexist.
Coping skills are not gender specific. How they help is different for each individual.
Women have their emotions unsupported just as much as men I know my mom didn’t have anyone caring about how she felt. Pretty sure that’s the stereotype of most American moms, they work all day come home cook and clean too.
I’ve never seen a man cry and be told to stop by anyone other than their own father. I’ve seen countless women be mocked for being emotional.
Sorry bro your comment is far too one sided to be taken seriously by me. Society is hard on everyone.
Type anything to show you’ve never been to therapy: ^ this post
Literally in therapy but okay. Continue to reject my perspective and unsupport a fellow dude. Hypocrites.
dude people here just want to dunk on men because it makes them feel good about themselves. it’s that sad, and that simple. they don’t care about having empathy for men, men are not ‘people’. they are ‘others’.
they don’t really give a shit about… the issue at hand or the issues in the therapy industry/society that systematically disenfranchise many men.
unironically they want men to ‘man up’ and ‘fix’ the problems and never acknowledge them. Because that is inconvenient for them and their viewpoints.
because to them everything is a weird power struggle for their particular disenfranchised group, and they see anyone else acknowledging anything else struggles as a detriment to their cause. they lack the big brain thought that maybe lots of people suffer in lots of different ways and that it’s not some zero-sum game about ‘who suffers the most’.
as if men’s issue with the mental health care system… don’t also apply to to various other groups. of which any one person can belong to multiples of those groups.
Who is “they” because the “they” is other men.
So why are we like mad at women in the comments it’s nonsense. Why disparage healthcare and therapy it’s nonsense.
The issue at hand is one demographic struggles to extend empathy and therefore doesn’t get it in return. Make the first step, be empathetic in your life and I swear if you respond saying you are I’m gonna laugh because no, reading your responses you’re not, you’re very “you” focused.
There’s no power struggle, and any you sense is disenfranchised groups trying to get power back from, guess who?
Who said I am a dude?
Dude is nongendered everyone is a dude, nice try tho trying to pull this though
I don’t agree
Yes they are. The genders are massivenly different in a lot of ways, and failure to acknowledge that is sexist.
But keep screaming that anything that disagrees with your particular narrative that women are great and perpetual victims of men and men are always bad, I guess? Because that’s not sexist, at all. lol
it couldn’t be that both men and women are people and both suffer from the same bullshit that they themselves perpetuate? nah.
But keep screaming that anything that disagrees with your particular narrative that women are great and perpetual victims of men and men are always bad, I guess?
Incel talk
read the whole comment
Again. Coping skills are not gender specific they’re individual specific.
Nobody is screaming. And yes women are victims of men, have you spoken to any of them about it? Because it’s rather helpful to have those conversations.
Your comment is just very one sided and that’s the side that has the most power on the planet and as a member of that side I have just as much perspective of you and I’m here to say – nah to most of what you said.
Men’s #1 issue is lack of empathy towards women, they isolate half the planet from supporting them. There’s your solution.
Men’s inability to open up is a trained behavior, and is reinforced the most by the group doing the most child care: women. Everytime a boy that cries gets told to “man up” that stereotype is repeated to them. This produces an echo that reverbs through most of society, and especially children, who then mock peers that express emotions.
Women are training their own oppressors. There is enough blame around for all genders.
No that’s ridiculous and hilarious to say. I’d agree there is enough to blame everyone but you’re not, you’re blaming women.
I’ve never been told to man up by a woman, only men. Ridiculous to say that.
Is it really that ridiculous? Biologically seen, men’s properties are mostly due to genetic selection by women over thousands of years, if they are conscious about it or not. Men that are more attractive to women are preferred partners, and the selection pressure is mostly on men, since women have a much higher biological cost in pregnancy, therefore they are much more “picky”. That is pretty proven science, and this pressure is also found in culture: men have the attributes that women want them to have to give them an advantage.
It would only take 2-3 generations of women AND men doing child care to fix those issues by reinforcing openness and acceptance, but that takes education, esp in the human sciences, and education for the masses in the US has been dismantled long ago even before the current razing.
Your comment is just very one sided and that’s the side that has the most power on the planet and as a member of that side I have just as much perspective of you and I’m here to say – nah to most of what you said.
The only ‘side’ that has power is the wealthy. But keep banging your gender war drum, it probably gives you meaning and purpose in life to collectively blame 'me’n for all the worlds ills as if anyone who has a penis or wants a penis is entirely the same.
Drink that kool aid. yum yum. Donald Trump and his buddies thank you for your vote.
The only ‘side’ that has power is the wealthy.
Pivot to wealth inequality because?
But keep banging your gender war drum, it probably gives you meaning and purpose in life to collectively blame 'me’n for all the worlds ills as if anyone who has a penis or wants a penis is entirely the same.
You are the one who made the issue about differences in sex and/or gender.
No wonder you made no progress in therapy. You’re completely obtuse.
Also, no one is blaming men for their life’s problems. That person, would need therapy. Also, please don’t speak for men as a pejorative, your views are not reflective of any kind of monolith within my sex as a class of people and continually self-victimising under the guise of speaking for men’s issues is disingenuous and pathetic.
i pivot to wealth inequality because the wealthy have all the resources and the rest of us don’t have enough.
that includes access to medical care and mental care. easiest way to get healthcare and therapy is to be rich so you can pay out of pocket and skip the limits/lines imposed by insurance companies.
a lot of people’s mental and health problems would also simple be alleviated by being able to have better food and a better work-life balance, both which are privileges of the wealthy that the less economically fortunate do not have access to.
these are straight facts, but i’m sure you’ll go into denial mode about how the poor and mentally unwell should just become their own therapists or something.
This is why you sucked in therapy and found it unhelpful. You’re pissy, jaded and uncomfortable with the concept of being wrong. Classic men shit.
Empathy would fix that, show that you don’t have to be so insecure because nobody else is that secure.
This thing has been trained on social media. Is that really wise?
I mean, I know they fixed it, but LLMs once suggested jumping off a bridge if you searched for help with suicidal ideation
“Having trouble quitting heroin? A little bit of heroin can really alleviate those cravings!”
Look, if you can afford therapy, really, fantastic for you. But the fact is, it’s an extremely expensive luxury, even at poor quality, and sharing or unloading your mental strain with your friends or family, particularly when it is ongoing, is extremely taxing on relationships. Sure, your friends want to be there for you when they can, but it can put a major strain depending on how much support you need. If someone can alleviate that pressure and that stress even a little bit by talking to a machine, it’s in extremely poor taste and shortsighted to shame them for it. Yes, they’re willfully giving up their privacy, and yes, it’s awful that they have to do that, but this isn’t like sharing memes… in the hierarchy of needs, getting the pressure of those those pent up feelings out is important enough to possibly be worth the trade-off. Is it ideal? Absolutely not. Would it be better if these systems were anonymized? Absolutely. But humans are natural anthropomorphizers. They develop attachments and build relationships with inanimate objects all the time. And a really good therapist is more a reflection for you to work through things yourself anyway, mostly just guiding your thoughts towards better patterns of thinking. There’s no reason the machine can’t do that, and while it’s not as good as a human, it’s a HUGE improvement on average over nothing at all.
therapy does not have to be expensive.
around 70% of my caseload is Medicaid and they don’t pay a dime
the remainder is mostly DOC (prison), they only pay if we charge No Show fee. so they pay to not go to therapy.
there’s 1-2 people who are funded by the county. they pay a $7 copay per session
therapy isn’t expensive, luigi is
Removed by mod
In my experience, it’s likely that some of those downvotes come from reflexive “AI bad! How dare you say AI good!” Reactions, not anything specific to mental health. For a community called “technology” there’s a pretty strong anti-AI bubble going on here.
You know, I don’t even disagree with that sentiment in principle, but expecting people to suffer when they could benefit from a technology because they only see the threats and dangers makes them no different than antivaxxers.
It is possible and logically consistent to urge caution and condemn the worst abuses of technology without throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I think we may be (re)-discovering the appeal of monotheistic religions, and why they hew patriarchal.
On average, men desperately need more mental health resources. But, on average, they are not comfortable building that with other men, and it often isn’t appropriate or effective to lean on their female significant other (if a straight man).
So - enter the primary description of ‘God’. Can listen any time but will always forgive, is super masculine but won’t emasculate you, and has never told another soul what you are thinking.
AI is always available and is unlikely to emasculate anyone, but that third item… Well, we’ll see where this goes.
Omg self host it omg
You’ve basically just described “confession”. You go into a little box designed to make it as difficult as possible for the priest to identify you, you talk about all the ways you feel like you’re a bad person, and the priest talks to you for a while about it, then gives you some actionable items to make amends and once you’ve done them God officially forgives you. The whole concept of confession is designed to allow people to let go of their regrets and live in the now. It’s actually quite clever as a bit of societal design. If modern priests had psychotherapy degrees then everyone in the world would have access to free therapy - unfortunately they wouldn’t be very useful for LGBT+ people.
And it’s awesome. Men aren’t allowed by others to show weakness. AI therapy genuinely helps a lot.
Maybe because it’s cheaper, easier and you’re not judged by other person.
Some people would rather yalk to something they know is fake than to talk to a person who may or may not be.
Part of me is ok with this in that any avenue to get mental health resources can be better than nothing. What worries me is that people will use ChatGPT for this sort of thing and these models will not be good help.
AI will reinforce delusional thinking. This is definitely not good.
I’ll admit I tried talking to a local deepseek about a minor mental health issue one night when I just didn’t want to wake up/bother my friends. Broke the AI within about 6 prompts where no matter what I said it would repeat the same answer word-for-word about going for walks and eating better. Honestly, breaking the AI and laughing at it did more for my mental health than anything anyone could have said, but I’m an AI hater. I wouldn’t recommend anyone in real need use AI for mental health advice.
Honestly of they could program a halfway decent AI therapist then art least it could take some of the load off our already insufficient mental health professionals by dealing with the lighter-weight cases, leaving the psychotherapists free to deal with the especially sick people.
The real problem becomes when bad or non scientific advice gets regurgitated to people over and over.
So… AI.
Better than nothing I guess. Obviously it’s a privacy nightmare. But therapy is hard to reach nowadays and I’ve noticed that many men are reluctant to make that step. It’d be preferable if they did, but if ChatGPT can at least give an outlet for the emotions then it might just save a few people. Seeing men demolish themselves because they’re too ashamed to seek help is something I’ve unfortunately seen quite often. Even though I’m aware of this I’ve still waited till it was way too late because I subconsciously didn’t want to give in to the “weakness”. I hate that men are conditioned this way, it costs lives.
many men are reluctant to make that step
Sometimes it’s not the patient to blame. I made the step, countless times since my childhood… I sought help… Result? Got several, diverging diagnostics, several medications that didn’t work, until the most recent psychiatrist and psychologist some months ago: the psychiatrist said I got “nothing” (even when I had a fresh cut on my wrist) and the second “struggled to find any complaints from me”. So I simply gave up on seeking medical care (and “care” in general, human or whatnot). I don’t use AI for therapy because, as a former programmer, I’m deeply aware of their underlying Markov chain and NN algorithms, but sometimes their probabilistic outputs lead me to insights I couldn’t get from any living Homo sapiens beings (such as the possibility that I have “Geschwind Syndrome”, a condition of which will probably stay undiagnosed).
Morons, giving all their personal information and insecurities to companies.
