The Rise of the Robot Therapist

More people are using AI-powered mental health apps. Is that a good thing?

Liz Zarka
The Bold Italic
Published in
6 min readNov 13, 2018

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Original artwork by Ameena Golding

Angela* gave up on the idea of seeing a therapist face to face a while ago. As the sole income earner in her household, her busy schedule and a tight budget led her to download the AI-powered therapy apps Woebot and Wysa to help alleviate feelings of depression. “If my life were more stable, I’d love to see a human therapist—but until then, the tiny, portable ones will have to suffice,” the 27-year-old said.

In the face of a tightening market for traditional psychotherapy in the Bay Area — which we just wrote about in-depth — thousands of San Franciscans have downloaded mobile mental-health apps such as Woebot, Wysa and Youper to manage their symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression. Unlike previous kinds of e-therapy services that connected users to human beings on the other end of a text message or a video call, these newer apps offer interactive chat experiences with bots programmed with artificial intelligence and wired to respond to users on the basis of their language.

The fact that more people are getting some form of help that may otherwise be unavailable is a good thing, but chatbot companies often obscure what their technology can accomplish.

Like Angela, many people can’t afford or don’t have time to embark on what could be an exhausting search to find an in-person therapist. These apps, on the other hand, are free and ready to talk in a matter of minutes.

They are also modeled primarily on cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT — one of the more researched types of therapies that rests on a solid evidence base for treating common mental disorders such as anxiety and depression. Because they’re readily accessible at all times of the day, users are able to generalize skills that they want to work on through interacting with the app — such as identifying irrational thought patterns, which experts call “cognitive distortions” — into daily life and are encouraged to set mental-health goals, track their moods and analyze the sources of those moods.

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