“Therapy became the place where I felt that both my experience and my existence mattered to someone else, not just to a machine designed to respond.”
AI therapy is affordable, anonymous, and always on – you just type a few words and someone (well, something) is there to “listen”. For help with a specific problem or just needing to get something off your chest at 2am, a chatbot can make complete sense. But the deeper work of psychotherapy, whether that be working through complicated feelings and experiences, painful relationship patterns or blocks, depends on something AI can’t yet provide: a fully embodied, human relationship within a professional setting.
Part of that is memory and lived experience. AI doesn’t get to know you. It might remember your last message in the moment, but it won’t track your history or sense when something’s changed in your voice or energy. It can’t understand nuance or empathise with your experience and so can feel dismissive or overly optimistic over time. More critically, AI remains largely unregulated and lacks clinical judgement. It has been shown to reinforce distress or harmful behaviour in reports on user’s experience around the world.
None of this is to say that AI has no role. For some people, it may even be what helps them take a first step toward therapy and where they first start to find words for their difficulties. That anonymous rehearsal can also embolden people to speak more openly with a professional once they arrive. But an AI bot isn’t a replacement for the presence of another human being who is trained to listen, to hold intricacy, and to engage with care and responsibility. That grounded sense of being seen -and held -is still, and maybe always will be, the thing that can heal us most.
- If therapy isn’t affordable for you, contacting your GP or the Samaritans is a good option. You can phone Samaritans on 116 123 or you can email jo@samaritans.org. You do not have to be in crisis to make contact.