Talking to therapists is difficult, time-consuming, painful, annoying, and expensive. The number of hoops you have to jump through just to get to the starting line is crazy, even if you are willing and able to pay the few hundred dollars an hour out of pocket yourself.
Therapy isn't like confession or church or a religious experience. Its proposed benefits will never be life changing, it will not build you up, it will not give you anything you didn't already have, and you have to pay for it.
If I can work out a few kinks in my psyche on my own I'll do that. If I bounce some words off of a convenient lie bot, then fine.
The only way I can get more f'd in the head would be to start killing, and at this point I just don't have the drive to take on murder as a new hobby.
PARRY was written in 1972 by psychiatrist Kenneth Colby,
then at Stanford University.
While ELIZA was a simulation of a Rogerian therapist,
PARRY attempted to simulate a person with paranoid schizophrenia.One of the fascinating things that was done was to have Parry & Eliza chat together.
So it immediately occurred to me that your comment would make an excellent Lenna[2] text to feed to AI chatbot therapists right after their initial pleasantries when they ask ~ "Now, what seems to be your problem?"
The various chatbot results would then be like the headliner in a suite of fitness tests for them and so, like the Turing Test, could be named in your honor, maybe called the Bizarro Test [Suite Protocol or BTSP].
Perhaps you would help humanity in its likely brief and futile resistance by granting permission ala Creative Commons for such use?
[1] blockquote is from wikipedia:PARRY ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY
[2] "Lenna (or Lena) is a standard test image used in the field of digital image processing, starting in 1973." -- wikipedia:Lenna ...
It's born out of my very real frustration at finally getting to a point where I could get therapy only to be continually stymied by multiple emails never responded to, multiple calls never answered or replied, and finally after one appointment for online therapy finally set up being ghosted by the practitioner.
I get that therapy is good, and I believe it can be helpful or else I would have never sought it out, but, I am amazed that anyone can get it.
I've also met people who have no money, no insurance, no job, but are able to get therapists with a single call, which is all the more infuriating because those same people have been consistently unable to help me do the same.
Money and tears and pleading won't open these doors for me and it almost feels personal, like the universe itself conspires to keep me specifically away from good mental health, so I have a nice reservoir of anger towards anyone who casually mentions that going to therapy will solve all your problems or that the conventional way of doing things is the right way to do them.
If human therapists make themselves unavailable to me both in person and online, then I'll make do without them.
The quality of human practitioners is...variable, and they tend to focus on only a few areas.
If you can get your money's worth from talking to most therapists, you're probably self-aware enough to get it from bouncing your thoughts off an LLM.
quantified•7h ago