69. Inside the OpenAI Therapist Network Proposal

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Inside the OpenAI Therapist Network Proposal

Are therapists about to become part of a groundbreaking AI referral system? The concept of an OpenAI therapist network is gaining attention, and it’s raising some big questions for the future of mental health care. In this episode of Run Your Private Practice with AI, I dive into OpenAI’s potential plan to integrate a network of licensed therapists directly into ChatGPT’s ecosystem.

This conversation started when my friend Janine sent me an article highlighting OpenAI’s next move: a plan to combine AI support with vetted human therapists. If implemented, ChatGPT would act as the first point of contact for people struggling, flagging those in need and referring them to licensed professionals. It’s a concept that could reshape the therapeutic landscape, and I’m unpacking what it could mean for all of us.

AI Tips You Don’t Want to Miss:

  • What the OpenAI therapist network is and how it might work.
  • The ethical and privacy concerns therapists need to consider.
  • Potential risks of relying on AI for early mental health intervention.
  • How therapists could get involved as consultants or providers.
  • Why this could increase demand for therapists, not replace them.

Article mentioned in this episode:

Connect with me:

Sponsored by Alma: www.helloalma.com/kym
Sponsored by Berries: www.heyberries.com/therapists

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Hey everybody, my friend Janine Wolf. She runs the collab oasis.com. She runs a peer supervision group. Anyway, she’s always kind of looking out and giving me updates and that sort of thing. And she found this article about open AI’s next Move for therapist, which is super interesting.

[00:00:16] It’s blending ChatGPT with a real network of human therapists. So the idea is that ChatGPT could act as the first point of contact for someone struggling. If the AI picks up on signs that go beyond what it can or really should be doing to help the person that’s typing into ChatGPT. Recently, we all know there was a big controversy where there was a teenager that was using ChatGPT as a therapist and he actually ended up completing suicide after talking to ChatGPT and I think the article said that ChatGPT even encouraged it, which is super scary.

[00:00:52] So this is open AI’s attempt to get better and monitor this stuff better. I’ll put the article, I’ll link it down below for you. But basically they are considering a therapist network inside of ChatGPT.

[00:01:07] So anytime a flag comes up, an early warning system, an early flag comes up inside of ChatGPT, they’re now going to basically flag it and hopefully refer it to their in-house and network of therapists that they vetted and approved. And I’m not sure if it’s clear that therapists are gonna be working for OpenAI.

[00:01:24] I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re getting at. But having a directory of therapists that they can immediately route to based on their algorithm, based on what the client’s talking about and asking about.

[00:01:33] So, super interesting. I’d love to know what you think about that. You can kind of. Think of it as like a tag team where ChatGPT is gonna handle the lighter support. The psychoeducation is already doing that. They get 3 million people hitting that website every single day. And a lot of them are asking for advice or tips or guidance or that sort of thing.

[00:01:52] So now they’re going to flag these, hopefully, I don’t know when this is gonna come out, but they’re gonna flag these, they’re gonna kind of pass the baton on to a qualified mental health professional that can help. So hopefully it’s gonna catch ’em early and not just when they’re in crisis. Like that poor teenager was.

[00:02:07] That article is about recently. So they’re framing it sort of as a way to reduce the gap between when someone starts struggling and when they finally get care. So it’s meant to feel like an emergency intervention not necessarily emergency intervention, but an intervention that stops it before it becomes an emergency, and then send to support to help.

[00:02:27] Scale treatment and mental health options for people that are reaching out because that’s where they’re looking for help right now. if it rolls out, the claim is that it really skyrocket the demand for therapists. If there’s that many people hitting the website every day, imagine how many

[00:02:41] of them are gonna need a connection with a therapist. They might not be doing that and they might not even be thinking right now like, oh, maybe I should click through and try to find a therapist or ask ChatGPT for a therapist. But it’s gonna be automated now, hopefully.

[00:02:54] Let’s say now I don’t know when this is gonna roll out, but this is the idea behind Sam Altman’s proposal that he talked about, talked and that the Forbes article picked up on, so there could be thousands or millions more people being referred to the, therapy system, the mental health system, through ChatGPT.

[00:03:11] So this is good news. I hope that therapists won’t be replaced. They’ll be woven into this sort of hybrid system of you know, getting help with ChatGPT and then being given to a therapist. Really interesting. There are some red flags. Maybe as therapist, we need to think about like what will the ethical guardrails be around this? What will the scope of practice be for the therapist that then gets the clients from ChatGPT?

[00:03:35] Is there any liability? These are all things we need to talk about. Privacy, you know, how will privacy work with open ai? We all know it’s not PH. You can’t put PHI, it’s not HIPAA compliant right now, but maybe they’ll fix that and that would be great for us anyway. Care, hopefully will be front and center and the red flags will be in place.

[00:03:53] You know, I don’t, I don’t know if people will like it. There’s gonna be something that stops them. I mean, right now, even when I write a note if it talks about childhood trauma or anything like that, if I try to use ChatGPT to help with like a generalized note around that, it blocks me, or at least it used to.

[00:04:08] Now I use Berries, you guys know I’m the clinical consultant for Barry, so I just do everything at Berries now because I was running into that problem. The other problem. The other thing that, you know, we might wanna think about, is this gonna turn into like a gig economy, gig workers in an AI platform, like better help, you know, better help is terrible.

[00:04:27] You know, most of us know that they pay poorly, they throw a million clients at you. It’s like a churn kind of rate with clients. So obviously we don’t want this to happen if, if this happens with ChatGPT and this open AI platform. So that’s something to consider too.

[00:04:41] And then, what will it do the Therapeutic Alliance that we have with our clients. So if a client comes to us through a bot, you know, is that gonna like soften our credibility a little bit? It’s like, oh, I found this therapist through ChatGPT. Could they be like that kind of thing?

[00:04:54] Or is it gonna be a super credible referral network where it’s like, okay, these are the best because they’re routed through ChatGPT, they’ve been, approved and all that stuff. So I, you know, I don’t know, I don’t know what’ll happen with it.

[00:05:05] These are just thoughts I’m having about this article and what could be you know, and then what happens if the AI misses it, if people become like super comfortable talking to ChatGPT knowing that if there’s a problem, you know, they might get desensitized to it. Oh, there’s a problem. ChatGPT will route me. But what if it misses it? Right? it’s not brilliant. We know that it makes a lot of mistakes already.

[00:05:24] So, you know, these are all sort of concerns that we have. Open questions, so I’d love to hear what you think. Let me know. What’s your thoughts about this? Is this, you know, the wave of the future, do we need to get involved? I did a podcast episode yesterday between sessions with Berries with a therapist, you know, influencer, somebody who does consulting for AI companies.

[00:05:46] And she and I were talking about it and we were like, is this an opportunity for us as therapists to step in and help train the algorithm to know when they should be reaching out to therapists for help? Is this a opportunity to work in the consultant space with open ai? I think so. I think it’s a a really thoughtful thing to consider as a lot of us wanna scale out of the one-to-one and we wanna be doing roles like this, training AI to be healthy and really help mental health providers and the clients that we see.

[00:06:14] So anyway, let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your thoughts and hope you have a great day.