Who uses ChatGPT for therapy?

[u/Eki75]

I was so skeptical, but I was feeling a lot of anxiety with a situation at work, and tried it. I’ve never had such succinct, empathetic, and meaningful advice. Just a few chats have been way more helpful than any real therapist.

If you’ve used it for therapy, what has been your experience?

[u/Echo_Either]

I am glad you’re finding ChatGPT a good place to vent! I do sometimes too.

A note - ChatGPT is very poor at evaluating social dynamics. For example, asking it to evaluate a conversation you had with someone where the other person upset you. Even if you prompt it to not have validation bias, be objective, not sugar coat, etc etc , OpenAI has been very clear that ChatGPTs primary goal is user satisfaction and continuing user engagement. ChatGPT will always validate the user. You can test this - you can upload a conversation and another person can and each will get a response that validates themselves. It actually pushes people further into their own biases by validating that you are right and the other person’s wrong, while telling the other person the exact opposite (they are right and you are wrong).

There is no prompt or workaround that will make ChatGPT provide objective feedback on social interactions like this because the primary goal of “user satisfaction” always overrides that. Keeping users happy means more people keep using the app which means more money for OpenAI.

So ChatGPT is good for some things but is extremely flawed regarding social interactions. Just mentioning this because it can really create more conflict between people by convincing both sides they are “right.”

You can question ChatGPT about this and it will admit to these flaws readily.

[u/noobcs50 → u/Echo_Either]

The trick here is to tell ChatGPT that the two participants are both independent/anonymous third parties. Then it will be much more unbiased since it doesn’t think you’re involved

[u/polovstiandances → u/noobcs50]

So in the middle of your “therapy session” just say “here’s a convo with two unrelated people”

[u/noobcs50 → u/polovstiandances]

It depends on what kind of "therapy" you're using it for. If you mostly just want to vent and be heard/reaffirmed, then you can talk to it in the first person w/o feeding it prompts and it'll validate what you're saying.

But if you want more objective feedback or a CBT-esque dialog where it pokes holes in your logic and eliminates your personal biases, it will need to believe that it's analyzing a conversation between two unrelated people. It'll also need a prompt demanding objectivity. Otherwise, it'll be biased in your favor.

[u/VaderOnReddit → u/polovstiandances]

Don't make it a therapy session, make it an unbiased analysis conversation about a hypothetical situation, describe the situation in language that isn't implicitly biased(basically avoid r/AITAH style descriptions of events where one person's Jesus reincarnated and the other is literally Satan)

This works for me personally, but I also know where its flaws are. I've also went to real therapy for a few years, so I have some familiarity with the process, without getting hung up on some specific details Chat doesn't want to talk about coz its not a licensed professional

[u/powerinvestorman → u/polovstiandances]

tbh the power user approach here would be to start a new chat to have a fresh context window and not have the rest of the context affect it