Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of a Left-Pod cast.

This is a sample of our recent bonus episode every couple of weeks or so, our crew of researchers,

Amanda and myself get together for a roundtable discussion.

So here's a few minutes for free so you can see what all the fuss is about.

All of this came about, saw a couple articles as we often do, one about robot therapists

that really, they may have existed before the pandemic, but of course they really landed

on the scene as people were being locked in their homes and having their mental health

quickly deteriorate.

So we have AI therapists in apps that you can chat with and so forth, which sounds,

I guess, depending on where you're coming from, interesting and potentially helpful or

horrifying.

But the flip side of it, particularly if you come down on the horrifying side of the

debate, on the flip side, you've got the total lack of access to mental health care

and think globally on this one.

Even if you just think within modern, wealthy countries, you might think, yeah, we don't

have enough access to mental health care.

Now think about a person in a poverty-stricken country or farther away from centralized

communities where access to a cell phone is far, far more prevalent than access to therapists

and you start to think, okay, well, maybe we need to inject some technology into our therapy

who wants to stake out a position and start this conversation.

The first thing I thought about when we talked about this offline was the AI portion of

it.

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