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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

The unfortunate reality though is that people are going to use whatever resources they have available to them, and ChatGPT is always there, ready to have a conversation, even at 3am on a Tuesday while the client is wasted. You don't need any credentials to see that.

And it depends on the therapy and therapist. If the client needs to be reminded to box breathe and that they're using all or nothing thinking again to get them off of the ledge, does that really require a human who's only available once a week to gently remind them of that when the therapist isn't going to be available for four more days and ChatGPT's available right now?

I don't know if that's a good thing, only that is the reality of things.

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> If the client needs to be reminded to box breathe and that they're using all or nothing thinking again to get them off of the ledge, does that really require a human who's only available once a week to gently remind them of that when the therapist isn't going to be available for four more days and ChatGPT's available right now?

There are 24/7 suicide prevention hotlines at least in many countries in Europe as well as US states. The problem is they are too often overcrowded because demand is so high - and not just because of the existential threat the current US administration or our far-right governments in Europe pose particularly to poor and migrant people.

Anyway, suicide prevention hotlines and mental health offerings are (nonetheless sorely needed!) band-aids. Society itself is fundamentally broken: people have to struggle to survive far too much, the younger generation stands to be the first one in a long time that has less wealth than their parents had at the same age [1], no matter wherever you look, and on top of that most of the 35 and younger generations in Western countries has grown up without the looming threat of war and so has no resilience - and now you can drive about a day's worth of road time from Germany and be in an actual hot war zone, risking getting shelled, and on top of that you got the saber rattling of China regarding Taiwan, and analyses on Russia claiming it's preparing to attack NATO in a few years... and we're not even able to supply Ukraine with ammunition, much less tanks.

Not exactly great conditions for anyone's mental health.

[1] https://fortune.com/article/gen-z-expects-to-inherit-money-a...

And the reason for this brokenness is all too easy to identify: the very wealthy have been increasingly siphoning off all gains in productivity since the Reagan era.

Tax the rich massively, use the money to provide for everyone, without question or discrimination, and most of these issues will start to subside.

Continue to wail about how this is impossible, there's no way to make the rich pay their fair share (or, worse, there's no way the rich aren't already paying their fair share), the only thing to do is what we've already been doing, but harder, and, well, we can see the trajectory already.

I guess if all you have is a hammer...

It's certainly easy to blame the rich for everything, but the rich have a tendency to be miserable (the characters in "The Great Gatsby" and "Catcher in the Rye" are illustrations of this). Historically, poor places have often been happier, because of a rich web of social connection, while the rich are isolated and unhappy. [1] Money doesn't buy happiness or psychological well-being, it buys comfort.

A more trenchant analysis of the mental health problem is that the US has designed ourselves into isolation, and then the Covid lockdowns killed a lot of what was left. People need to be known and loved, and have people to love and care about, which obviously cannot happen in isolation.

[1] I am NOT saying that poor = happy, and I think the positive observations tended to be in poor countries, not tenements in London.

> There are 24/7 suicide prevention hotlines at least in many countries in Europe as well as US states.

My understanding is these will generally just send the cops after you if the operator concludes you are actually suicidal and not just looking for someone to talk to for free.

I mean that's clearly a good thing. If you are actually suicidal then you need someone to intervene. But there is a large gulf between depressed and suicidal and those phone lines can help without outside assistance in those cases.

> If you are actually suicidal then you need someone to intervene.

Yeah, trained medics, not "cops" that barely had a few weeks worth of training and only know how to operate guns.

> just send the cops after you

> > that's clearly a good thing

You might want to read up on how interactions between police and various groups in the US tend to go. Sending the cops after someone is always going to be dangerous and often harmful.

If the suicidal person is female, white and sitting in a nice house in the suburbs, they'll likely survive with just a slightly traumatizing experience.

If the suicidal person is male, black or has any appearance of being lower class, the police are likely to treat them as a threat, and they're more likely to be assaulted, arrested, harassed or killed than they are to receive helpful medical treatment.

If I'm ever in a near-suicidal state, I hope no one calls the cops on me, that's a worst nightmare situation.

When the story about the ChatGPT suicide originally popped up, it seemed obvious that the answer was professional, individualized LLMs as therapist multipliers.

Record summarization, 24x7 availability, infinite conversation time...

... backed by a licensed human therapist who also meets for periodic sessions and whose notes and plan then become context/prompts for the LLM.

Price per session = salary / number of sessions possible in a year

Why couldn't we help address the mental health crisis by using LLMs to multiply the denominator?

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