The Rise of the AI ​​Therapist

AI therapists can flatten humanity into predictable patterns, and thus sacrifice the intimate, individualized care expected of traditional human therapists. “Pi’s logic leads to a future where we may all find ourselves patients in algorithmic asylums run by digital wardens,” writes Obrahouse. “Algorithmic shelters don’t need bars on windows or white-bold rooms because there’s no escape. Shelter is already there in your homes and offices, schools and hospitals, courthouses and barracks. Wherever there’s an Internet connection, shelter awaits.”

Routledge, 2025

Evan Flam, a researcher who studies the intersection of technology and mental health, echoes some of the same concerns. Chatbot Therapy: A Critical Analysis of AI Mental Health Therapy. A rigorous academic primer, the book analyzes assumptions about the mechanism of automated treatment and capital incentives offered by AI chatbots.

Flam observes that the capitalist mentality behind new technologies “often leads to questionable, illegitimate and illegal business practices in which consumer interests are secondary to strategies for market dominance.”

This does not mean that therapy-bot makers “will inevitably engage in nefarious activities contrary to the interests of consumers in pursuit of market dominance.”

But he notes that the success of AI therapy depends on making money and being committed to healing people. In this logic, exploitation and therapy feed off each other: every digital therapy session generates data, and that data fuels the system that profits to care for unpaid users. The more effective the therapy seems, the more the cycle perpetuates itself, making it difficult to distinguish between care and commodification. “Users benefit more from an app than from its therapeutic or other mental health intervention,” he writes, “the more they exploit it.” ”

This realization of the economic and psychological ouroboros – the snake that eats its own tail. sikethe first novel by Fred Linzer, an author with a research background in AI.

“The story of a boy-meets-girl AI psychotherapist,” has been described as, ” sike Follows Adrian, a young Londoner who makes a living ghostwriting rap lyrics, in his romance with Mookie, a business professional who’s down to find profitable technologies in the beta stage.

Selden Books, 2025

The title refers to a fast-paced commercial AI therapist uploaded to a pair of smart glasses named Psyche, which Adrian uses to interrogate his multiple concerns. “When I signed up to Psych, we set up our dashboard, a vast black panel like an airplane cockpit that showed my daily ‘vitals,'” Adrian explained. speak and cough.”