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Comment by WorkerBee28474 | Hacker News Reader

I think that LLMs are therapists are here to stay, simply because there's so much demand at a price point too low for a human therapist.

I wonder if we'll discover that much of therapy's benefit is from having another human actually spare their time and attention, showing that they care, which will not be reproduced by ML.

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The main benefit of a therapist is they give you the vocabulary to express a emotional state or thought process. Once you have the vocabulary to communicate your emotions then it will helps alleviate or eliminate the Cognitive dissonance.

There are many benefits to a therapist. Understanding a problem is not the same as solving it, and many problems are not cognitive dissonances.

Most of the problem isn't the problem people are trying to solve. It is more about injecting a better mental model and then re-framing it from another perspective, that is the problem but it isn't the problem people think they have.

I don't think the science supports any psuedotheories like this. All talk therapy is approximately equally effective, suggesting that it's the act of sitting down and talking that provides the benefits rather than the specific content of the therapy or intent of the therapist.

Yep. My wife is a person centered counsellor. The core of this approach is that the therapist is not the expert in the client, and provides no direction to the client. They just provide a space for the client to explore their issues.

Other modalities can be much more directive to the client, but are equally effective. Some may work better for different people, but not for all of them.

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