Rise of the Therabot – will AI replace your therapist?

Therapy costs are skyrocketing, and finding the right fit is a struggle. AI therapists like Therabot promise a cheaper, more accessible alternative – but are they the real deal?

When you’re down in the trenches, who can you turn to? Sometimes, it feels like there’s no one to consult and nowhere to go.

I’ve been there – I think most of us have. It’s easy to tell someone to get a shrink, as if it’s as simple as picking up a pack of paracetamols.

At the airport the other week, I overheard a few friends discussing how much they pay their therapists. The range went from a bargain-basement $50 an hour all the way up to $250. It felt weird that something so inherently private had been turned into a game of one-upmanship.

Machines that listen

A clinical trial of Therabot, an AI-driven therapist suite developed by a team of leading psychiatric researchers at Dartmouth College, was published in the New England Journal of Medicine with positive findings.

In the trial, Therabot reduced depression symptoms by 51%, anxiety by 31%, and eating disorder concerns by 19% – similar to human-provided therapy.

Participants exchanged about ten messages per day with Therabot, showing sustained interaction.

This is a far cry from generic conversations you’d have with ChatGPT, with its regular hallucinations and tendency to bend whichever way you want it to.

Therabot was trained on established therapeutic techniques, not “an internet scrape” of general conversation, as is often the case with chatbots.

These promising results highlight AI’s effectiveness in narrowing in on specific topics like sleep disorders, workplace burnout, or self-esteem coaching.

Still, as it stands, an AI therapist may struggle to incorporate the humanistic nuance that a patient would appreciate. I remember my therapist telling me to embrace “the wonderful ordinary” in everyday life – something she’d learned from her mentor.

Apparently, he would wax lyrical about the different types of bread available in his local supermarket.

The current AI model excels in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which is proactive and closely linked to neuroplasticity – helping rewire the brain to default to healthier, more constructive thinking. Basically, it’s a technique based on practice.

So, where you might have a session with a human therapist that isn’t about being prompted – where you even sit in silence for a few moments, either by choice or because you’re struggling to speak – an AI therapist would struggle to instigate silence or read between the lines when a patient needs downtime.

Affordable therapy solutions

One of the daunting aspects of therapy is that it can be a costly commitment. I personally was paying around $85 per weekly session, and even though it was worth its weight in gold, it was expensive gold.

Also, it can be hard to pair with the right person. Quite often, you walk away from a trial session with a sour taste in your mouth, especially if the therapist doesn’t communicate on your wavelength.

A platform like Therabot, available through WhatsApp, could help bridge financial and accessibility obstacles.

According to the report, earlier versions of Therabot had generic, trope-like responses like “Go on,” “Hmmm,” and “Seems like your problems stem from your mother.” But the developers improved the model’s ability to give more relevant, meaningful responses, rather than just parroting common therapist phrases.

However, just because one AI bot has been finely tuned doesn’t mean everyone will follow suit. Clients may still dabble with ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, which can be asked to speak in character as virtually anything – and no warnings or disclaimers come with it.

Apps like Therabot don’t have to replace therapists. They could be used as a helpful assistant for checking in between weekly human sessions.

In the regulatory Wild West of AI, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) would need to classify a therapy bot as a medical device before it could be properly regulated as an effective outlet.

Previous cases of AI therapy gone wrong include the National Eating Disorders Association’s chatbot, Tessa, which in 2023 mistakenly told users to maintain a calorie deficit – even when they had eating disorders that required support, not encouragement to lose weight. This led to binge eating and severe backlash.

As for Therabot, I gave it a whirl earlier, and it seems like a viable option for an insightful chat – but nothing beats the real thing and the “wonderful ordinary” of having a human therapist as part of your recovery process.