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Notes -
I just can’t get excited for AI therapy because honestly, unless you have literally nobody in your life to talk through things with, there’s no value to therapy. I just don’t see people with long-standing issues get better because they had therapy. In fact, some people have therapy for multiple years without ever getting to the point of not needing therapy anymore.
I’m very much of the Stoic/CBT/Jordan Peterson school of therapy. Over focus on feelings and overthinking problems not only does not work, but quite often makes your original issues much worse. The key to getting better (barring something organically wrong with your brain — and that’s fairly rare) is to get out of your own head and get into taking productive actions to make your life better. Feeling bad about yourself is much better treated by becoming a better person than by sitting around trying to convince yourself that just because you haven’t ever done anything useful doesn’t mean that you’re useless. Get out there and start building, fixing or cleaning things. You’ll get over feeling worthless because you’ll know you did something useful.
Uh, isn't the evidence that therapy- or at least forms of therapy- is genuinely helpful to people with actual mental health issues- or at least some subset thereof, eg PTSD- pretty ironclad?
Thankfully I do have my effortpost/AAQC on the topic handy:
https://www.themotte.org/post/983/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/209218?context=8#context
(In short, yes)
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