My parents are clinical psychologists with 40 years experience, and they both agree LLMs could be a great boon to many many unserved people if made well. They think this is a wonderful avenue of research. But agree in the moment it’s not ready. I think the ethics of allowing people to suffer due to economics while ignoring a technology that can help them is worse, no? Telling them to seek a health professional when none are available is worse ?
Current LLMs would instead be steered by previous tokens, meaning the patient does. So someone that for example has schizophrenia may actually convince the LLM it's true.
p.s. there's some interesting literature on how in some circumstances (i.e. religious delusions), where actually validating the patient - basically confirming their experience can lead to rapid recovery (however this approach is not found in western culture). I do agree with you in terms of the risks of LLM's driving folks deeper into delusional beliefs & behaviors - it's very real.
I can't understand how anyone can do this in good conscience.
Is it ok for models to offer specific mental health interventions, or just provide neutral information? To what degree is that technically achievable? Does the answer depend on the scenario?
Health care workers have mandated reporting responsibilities (in the US, I assume other countries are similar) for some situations. Should models be bound by this responsibility as well? (I think yes but it is a thorny question). How to achieve that while preserving patient privacy for issues that don’t fall under mandated reporting rules?
We also have standards of care for health workers. Benchmarks are good, but that’s similar to a licensing requirement, and we have accountability mechanisms when people don’t adhere to their ethical and professional duties. What should be the liability situation when a model responds out of standard resulting in harm (to the standard of evidence we would hold a human health worker)?
Maybe I am not plugged in to this space enough, but my impression is these questions aren’t really in the foreground
Also, it’s a different mode of delivery. Some people work well remotely, others better in person. Likewise some people open up more easily to a machine than a person. One doesn’t replace the other.
Further, LLMs can be very useful for diagnostic work in addition to a psychologist to help accurately classify mental and personality disorders. This is my fathers speciality and he finds modern LLMs to be fairly adept at classifying.
A lot of psychologist work in a clinical setting is case notes and an LLM can be quite skilled at producing standard expected case note structures from clinical notes, improving the time spent by the professional in care vs paperwork.
All of these are opportunities for use of LLMs as specialist models, agentic frameworks around general models, guard rails, delivery mechanisms, etc. I wouldn’t look at the world being OpenAI and Anthropic, but as model providers as providing screws and bolts and it’s up to us to build the products. LLMS are trained with an enormous corpus of witting on mental illness, but also writings by the mentally ill, care professionals, and all sorts of other materials. By eliciting all these dimensions the applications to mental health are enormous - it is a giant learned model of human thought and experience, not just of factual information, but the entire complex.
Here’s an idea I’ve talked to my dad about - how about using a model set trained on the writing of many people of specific mental illnesses. Then you can interact with them and they will produce responses likely of someone with that illness. This can be used to train clinicians, but also to build better inventories and diagnostics since you know the classification of the responses to some reasonable degree. This should accelerate research into mental illnesses.
The possibilities are vast, limited by our imagination and biases.
This is a fundamental personal failure. Not being able to open up to a professional whose purpose is to help you. The first step is to be honest with yourself, then honest with the person whose entire professional purpose is to help you.
AI psychologists will only ever be able to do so much, but I imagine it will be a whole lot of “you’re right” with very few harsh truths, criticisms, or personal development.
Not necessarily. Half-measures—especially those that try to offer technological solutions to social problems—allow the actual root problems to remain unaddressed, fester, and grow. The ACA was a hack for a failing system, and then when that quit working, more hacks were added on top, and on and on. LLMs are just another hack that let the can get kicked down the road once more.
If and until actual meaningful health care system reforms happen, the rich will continue getting their $63,000 14-day concierge service from Mass General Brigham whenever they feel blue, and the rest of us will end up getting Doctor Amazon telling us to practice deep breathing and buy some supplements.
In other words, mental health professionals will resist this technology to replace them until they realize they can put it in front of people like a new kind of web form, at which time the same will become amazing and wonderful.
At the very least, a tool like this could serve as an anti-virus and firewall for poor and harmful experiences from mental health professionals towards clients.
The fact is a lot of people have trust issues, anxieties, social issues. Some are paranoid, suffer extreme neuroses, or panic in a social situation. Some have felt betrayed by professionals seeking to help them, putting them into inpatient care against their wishes, or medicating them with debilitating medications to sedate them, which is common for people experiencing mania. That’s not a personal failure, that’s just personal issue. And someone seeking mental help is having personal issues more often than not, unless they’re just seeking life coaching.
Ascribing these as fundamental personal failures, and therefore they deserve their personal hells with no relief unless they comply with your view of how people must be, is cruel.
The sycophantic behavior you’re outlining is a result of reinforcement learning and alignment, not a fundamental property of generative language models.
Fine, let’s have socialized delivery of mental health care. Let’s go back in time 20 years and establish a pipeline of capable providers that doesn’t exist. Let’s do those things if we can. But I don’t see it happening in my life time.
I do however see an opportunity to take the technologies presented to use in the immediate present and providing a mechanism to bring help to people who need it today with good efficacy where it’s appropriate. Is it OpenAI that brings that? I doubt it - they’re selling shovels, not digging for gold. Is it a general model that provides direct care? Doubtful IMO. Is it a chatbot interface ? I doubt that too. But I think if we are creative and thoughtful we can use these technologies to address huge swaths of the care providing problem, which is more than talk therapy. And we can do it today, and don’t have to wait for MAGA/MAHA to accept reality on realities terms.
Luckily this is only about fixing health care, so much easier. ;-) And, no, neither of us can single-handedly fix the more proximal causes of the problem, but you and me and around 268 of our best friends could.
I have no crystal ball and I am no genius. All I know is that an LLM will not make the inpatient beds come back once a hospital has been gutted by PE. It will not make the drugs suddenly affordable for the patient who needs them. It will not fix the terror and suffering caused by the system. It will not offer a genuine human connection. But it might give ammunition to the next guy who wants to “save money” by defunding 988, or discourage the next generation of mental health providers from choosing this as a discipline at all.
Obviously something must be done. But could the effort you spend on developing another hack atop the broken system instead be spent on getting the right people into the right places to fix the right problems? At the least, I’d ask “what would cause me to change my mind about this?”, and then work to make sure that there’s no way that thing could be true.
Thank you for the conversation, I appreciate it.