AI Therapy Deep Dive: Can a Chatbot Be Your Therapist? w/ Dr. Nick Jacobson

Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson

Being Well

Health & Fitness, Education, Self-improvement, Mental Health

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2025

⏱️ 87 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

AI chatbots may already be the largest providers of mental health services in the United States, raising big questions about safety, effectiveness, and oversight. Dr. Rick and Forrest are joined by Dr. Nick Jacobson to explore the risks and opportunities of AI therapy: Can a chatbot be good at therapy? Will it replace human therapists? What about AI psychosis? How should we think about privacy, bias, and regulation? Is this a silver bullet for mental health access, or are we just opening a new can of worms? About our Guest: Nick is associate professor of biomedical data science, psychiatry, and computer science at Dartmouth, and directs the AI and Mental Health Laboratory there. He’s also the developer of Therabot, a generative AI therapy chatbot that predates ChatGPT, and he’s one of the first researchers to run a clinical trial on AI therapy. Key Topics: 02:35: Is AI going to replace human therapists? 05:00: Risks of using ChatGPT as your therapist, and general vs. therapy-specific AI 14:30: What should people be worried about? 19:14: Is AI good at therapy? 29:58: Bias, values, and “who’s watching the watchers” 39:17: Is there something unique about a human therapist? 52:21: Oversight and the self-driving car analogy 1:00:51: Personhood, consciousness, and risks of anthropomorphizing AI 1:11:00: Recap Support the Podcast: We're now on Patreon! If you'd like to support the podcast, follow this link. Sponsors If you have ADHD, or you love someone who does, I’d recommend checking out the podcast ADHD aha! Level up your bedding with Quince. Go to Quince.com/BEINGWELL for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty-five -day returns. Join hundreds of thousands of people who are taking charge of their health. Learn more and join Function at functionhealth.com/BEINGWELL. Listen now to the Life Kit podcast from NPR. Go to Zocdoc.com/BEING to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/beingwell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the show,
0:11.4	thanks for listening today, and if you've listened before, welcome back. Over the last year or so,
0:16.1	two stories have increasingly collided. The first is what you could fairly call a crisis of mental health
0:21.2	access in the United States, where millions of people struggle to reach effective care. The second
0:26.4	is the rapid rise of generative AI. Surveys suggest that roughly half the people living in the United
0:32.3	States use large language models like chat GPT, and I can tell you that number is only going up, and people
0:38.7	are increasingly turning to these AI chatbots for mental health support. In March, there were over
0:43.7	16.5 million posts on TikTok alone about using chat GPT as your therapist, and a recent survey
0:50.7	by Common Sense Media found that 72% of American teens have used AI as a companion.
0:56.7	These surveys and others like them suggest that AI chatbots may already be the single largest
1:01.9	providers of mental health in the United States, larger by far than any hospital network,
1:07.2	therapy app, or government program.
1:10.1	That rise has been met inside the field of psychology
1:12.4	with both some excitement and a lot of unease. Critics worry about the risks here. Chatbots that
1:18.5	hallucinate, give unsafe advice, people forming unhealthy attachments to a machine, potential loss
1:23.7	of privacy, AI psychosis, and the lack of clear legal oversight, just to name
1:28.3	a few. And that's before we get into the simple question of whether an AI chatbot can conduct
1:32.9	effective therapy. There's a lot going on here, and today we're going to be trying to sort
1:38.0	through it. So to help me do that, I'm joined my two guests. First, as usual, clinical psychologist,
1:42.8	and my dad, Rick Hansen. So, Dad, how are you doing
1:45.0	today? I'm doing really well, and this is actually the real me, not an avatar, simulating Rick.
1:52.9	We don't have the hologram out of Rick yet, yet the future is uncertain. We'll see. And to help us
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Being Well, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Being Well and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.