Podcast Club ONLINE: AI Therapy
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About this event
For this week's meeting, we're asking that you BOTH listen to podcast and read an ARTICLE. There is also a separate optional article for those who want to read more.
As of early 2026, ChatGPT alone (excluding other LLMs) had between 800 million to 900 million active users weekly. A health research survey of over 20,000 U.S. adults, published January 21st, found that among those that used generative AI daily, 87.1% reported using it for personal reasons including advice and emotional support. Furthermore, some studies say about 28% of all Americans use AI for personal relationship and therapy advice. Every indication is that this number will only be increasing. So how good is AI as a therapist? How safe is it? Why are people drawn to it, and are naysayers just in doomsday mode? After all, human therapists have serious limitations as well, right? These are among the questions we'll be exploring this week.
The podcast, which provides an overview of this week's topic, is The Therapist Thrival Guide, with host Miranda Barker and guest Rachel Wood. Wood has a PhD in cyberpsychology (the study of the digitally-connected human experience), with a focus on the impact of AI and synthetic relationships. She is a licensed therapist, trains mental health professionals through the AI Mental Health Collective, and advises companies on the ethical design and development of AI systems.
The required article, entitled Therapy Chatbots and Emotional Complexity: Do Therapy Chatbots Really Empathise?, is in the April 2026 Volume of the scientific journal Current Opinion in Psychology. Please do not just read the summary of the article, as the article raises many interesting points.
The optional-reading article, entitled Use of Generative AI Chatbots and Wellness Applications for Mental Health, is a health advisory published by the American Psychological Association. It lays out both concerns on the use of AI chatbots and mental health wellness apps and recommendations for how to make those tools safer.
or
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1PfYCa0FsGDd3nwxkNFnNO
(40 min.)
2. REQUIRED ARTICLE
Please go to the article HERE.
3. OPTIONAL-READING ARTICLE
https://www.apa.org/topics/artificial-intelligence-machine-learning/health-advisory-chatbots-wellness-apps
What's a podcast club?
It's like a book club for podcasts. Each week we discuss an interesting and currently-relevant episode from podcasters like Ezra Klein, Michael Shermer, or Russ Roberts. We start off as a large group and spend most of the time talking in small break-out groups, which we remix 3 times during the course of the evening. Our conversations are casual and open. We ask that everyone speak respectfully at all times, and we encourage free and concise discussion relevant to the week's podcast topic. To do this, we try to adhere to Grice's Maxims: https://bit.ly/2p4uSQm
Ultimately, the idea is to help each other think a little differently, learn a thing or two and have some fun.
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