Julian Adler
The largest mental health “provider” in the United States is either a jail in Los Angeles or an AI chatbot—depending on how you count. This points to an obvious truth: when social support systems like mental health treatment fail, something else fills the gap.
The question usually asked of therapy bots is can they be made to do what humans already do well? But what if the problem starts with humans?
This brief maintains artificial intelligence is reproducing counterproductive or harmful patterns human practitioners were the first to construct. The task is to markedly improve the quality of therapeutic practices and radically democratize their access—whether the means of that access is human or AI.
