Does your therapist use AI?
Maybe. A lot of therapists have turned to AI to take notes and do paperwork.
Do you know if your therapist uses it? Therapists are required to get consent before recording your conversations, which is how most therapy AI products work. If you’re not sure, ask your therapist. And ask for what you want. It’s up to you.
“Notes that write themselves.” —Mentalyc
What do you want?
As a therapist, I’ve decided to stick with doing my own notes and paperwork.
“Get back 5 to 10 hours each week” —Blueprint
No doubt I could get back some time if I used AI. With every decision, though, there are pros and cons. What are the cons?
“The subtleties of human feelings and experiences are still difficult for AI to fully comprehend.” —SimplePractice
That’s from a purveyor of AI. But it’s an understatement—human feelings and experiences are totally incomprehensible to AI.
And that’s my job as a therapist: tracking with your feelings and experiences and understanding them on a deep level. That provides the groundwork for conversations about your story, challenges, values, and desires. Would anyone expect a non-human to understand these conversations?
Why I choose to take notes. AI records sessions, analyzes the words, and turns them into notes. It’s being trained to process language at higher levels, such as sentiment analysis. It has a long way to go—we’ve all had encounters with AI that make it painfully obvious it doesn’t actually understand our sentiments. It misses nuances, idioms, sarcasm, and references to relationships, culture, and stuff from other times and places. Besides, human existence consists of more than just words. We use lots of nonverbal cues to communicate. If we don’t, we might get called robotic.
So, while AI can capture words in a counseling session, it fails to understand what’s going on. I want my notes to reflect what happens in a session. So I’m choosing to take my own notes.
Why I do my own paperwork. Let’s be honest: it’s the unexciting, solo part of my job. AI offers to summarize dialogue, analyze patterns, write treatment plans, and even to diagnose you. Doing these tasks myself requires me to actively think about you between sessions. Sometimes I have to think really hard about what’s going on and where we should go next.
If AI writes everything for me, I’d spend less time and energy thinking about you. I would be less engaged. So I’m choosing to do my own paperwork.
Questions:
If your therapist wanted to use AI and asked for your consent, how would you respond?
You could ask:
Is it a problem if I say no?
How would AI enhance the work we do here?
What do you want?
