Digital offers can be supportive, but do not replace psychotherapy.
Photo: Adobestock/Simplehappyar
Psychotherapies are more than just listening or answering questions. They are therapeutic concepts that deal with feelings, thinking and the resulting actions and behaviors of people. Interactions in therapeutic sessions live from the interpretation of the said – beyond the importance of a word or sentence. And to be heard and understood, a relationship and interpersonal skills are required.
The lack of psychotherapists reveals the question of whether artificial intelligence is also able to do so. So what if the therapy interview leads instead of a human therapist in the future? The temptation is great to establish AI in this area too.
Before pandemic, almost a third of the adult Europeans suffered from mental illnesses. The psychotherapeutic offer is not sufficient in any European country. In Germany, the average waiting time for an adult therapy place is more than half a year. It hits children and young people even worse. Only about 20 percent of the therapists with cash license are specialized in this age group. And in the United States, more than eleven million people are not treated despite needs.
It is therefore not surprising that research on AI has been researched as a psychotherapy replacement for years. In a recent study from the United States, researchers wanted to find out whether the study participants notice whether the therapist was a person or AI in a couple therapy interview. For this, 18 couple therapy scenes were played with human and artificial therapists. If this is known, it is right. Alan Turing, pioneer of theoretical computer science and computer technology, proposed the famous Turing test in 1950. It should be used to check whether a machine has equivalent thinking skills to humans.
In the current study, the participants hardly recognized a difference between people and the machine. They assessed the therapeutic effectiveness of the AI generated answers higher.
What does that mean for practice? Not much, because the study dealt with couple therapies and not psychotherapy. Unlike couple therapies, psychotherapies, according to Sander from the Institute for Medical Psychology and Medical Sociology at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, would have the goal of “reducing symptoms of mental illness”. Harald Baumeister, head of the Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy at the Institute of Psychology and Pedagogy at the University of Ulm, also makes it clear that more than just language models are necessary: ”Linguistically, AI chatbots should not be equated with psychotherapy”. The current study shows that generative AI is able to produce sentences in such a way “that they are not distinguishable by uninvolved third parties or can hardly be distinguished from the sentences of the psychotherapists and tend to be assessed as more well -formulated”. It is also questionable for Johanna Löchner, professor of clinical psychology and psychotherapy of the childhood and adolescence, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, “whether chatbots (the) role of an empathic and perhaps also confrontational, motivating conversation partner”. Other studies show that digital applications are more effective than “self-help offers” if people were involved.
Sander from the University of Freiburg doubts the triumphal march of AI in psychotherapy. The latter fulfill “a number of other functions” and satisfactory human needs. So what drives AI research in this area? Sander summarizes it briefly and briefly: Ki is “resource -saving and 24/7 available”. But what if it will soon only be about efficiency? It is feared that a change from digital additional offers to digital replacement therapies will not only come faster than expected. Two years ago, an attempt showed that Harald Baumeister said that, in confidence in chatt, body and life of clients can also be at risk.
The psychotherapeutic offer is not sufficient in any European country.
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