AI Myths Keeping Therapists on the Sidelines with Lisa Mustard
AI myths are stopping a lot of therapists from even getting started, and in this episode, I’m breaking down the ones that come up most. From fears about client data and environmental impact to the bigger question of whether AI is actually going to replace us, this conversation gets into all of it.
In this episode of Run Your Private Practice with AI, I’m joined by Lisa Mustard of The Therapy Show Podcast. Lisa is also the course administrator for a free four-part CE course I created through Berries Academy called The Power of AI for Mental Health Professionals.
AI Tips You Don’t Want to Miss:
- Why the environmental impact of AI is much smaller than most therapists think.
- How to vet an AI platform to make sure your client data stays protected.
- What the research actually says about AI and clinical skill delivery, and what it means for your practice.
- How AI is already being used to audit clinical notes and why your documentation needs to be airtight.
- The first step to take if you have been putting off trying AI in your practice.
Mentioned in this episode:
Free CE you can earn with Berries + Kym Tolson https://mustardconsulting.freshlearn.com/checkout/Course/39430
Connect with me:
- Instagram: @thetravelingtherapist_kym
- Join the Clinical AI Club: www.clinicalaiclub.com
Sponsored by Alma: www.helloalma.com/kym
Sponsored by Berries:www.heyberries.com/therapists
Sponsored by Auralink Pro: Start your free trial and use code KYMTOLSON for 20% off www.auralink.com/pro
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Kym: Hey there and welcome back to Run Your Private Practice with ai. I’m your host Kym Tolson, and I have such a fun episode for you today. So my friend Lisa Mustard, you may know her from the Therapy Show podcast recently invited me back on her show to talk about something I’m incredibly passionate about, the power of AI for mental health professionals, and we really got into it in this episode.
[00:00:26] We talked about the biggest myths are keeping therapists on the sidelines when it comes to ai. Things like AI is going to replace us, or these tools are stealing our client data, or even the environmental concerns that keep coming up. We break down all of that in this episode. We also talked about a free CE course that I created with Berries Academy.
[00:00:47] It’s a four part series called The Power of AI for Mental Health Professionals, and you can earn 1.25 free continuing education credits just for watching it. I’ll drop the link down on the show notes so you can grab that. So whether you’re AI curious, or you’ve already started experimenting with these tools in your practice, this conversation’s gonna give you so much clarity and confidence about where AI fits what we do as clinicians.
[00:01:12] So originally we recorded this for Lisa’s podcast and I enjoyed the conversation so much. I thought it would be really fun to share it over here on Run Your Private Practice with AI Podcast. So right after this, check it out, let me know what you think. Let me know if you have any questions and go check out that free CE that I recorded for you through Berries Academy, we’ll put the link down below in the show notes. So let’s dive in. Here’s my conversation with Lisa Mustard.
[00:01:39] Lisa: We are so excited to talk about this topic today, and you put together a four-part series, I guess you call it a webinar on the power of AI for mental health professionals.
[00:01:50] And so you created this course for Berries and they have a new Berries Academy. Then I said, Hey, why don’t we add CEs to this course? So I’m the course administrator for this amazing 1.25 credit hour that you can get for free. We’ll put the link in the show notes and it’s so good. I watched it all before I said yes.
[00:02:10] Let’s do it. Just to make sure I covered all the bases for guidelines, but there’s so much we could talk about and I just want people to go and watch the webinar. But where would you like. Just thinking about AI and mental health, there are a lot of myths and misconceptions. So many. The first one that comes to my mind is that.
[00:02:31] People think, therapists think that AI is gonna take over our businesses and it’s gonna, we’re gonna be completely obsolete. We’re not gonna be needed anymore. I say that’s a myth. Other myths that come to mind for me are that they’re training these models, they’re stealing information from our clients, and they’re gonna take it and sell it to the highest bidder. And that’s a myth too. What other myths do you hear?
[00:02:53] Kym: The biggest objection that comes up these days is like the environmental impact. AI is having a huge environmental impact. I don’t wanna say it’s not. However, they’re improving the models a lot. For example, Sam Altman just came out with a study that just showed like how much they’ve been able to reduce energy usage for just, simple like ChatGPT prompt over time.
[00:03:15] So over the last five years, it’s dramatically decreased with the efficiency they’re doing with these. There’s another study, Lisa, I’ve gotta give it to you. You can put it in the show notes. People can go check it out. That basically is a comparison chart of how much energy writing an AI progress note actually takes and uses.
[00:03:32] It’s pretty eye-opening ’cause a lot of therapists are like, I’ll never use AI because it just uses so much energy. You’re killing the environment, that sort of thing. So you can write 60, I think it’s 60 progress notes for the same amount of energy of streaming Netflix for 30 minutes.
[00:03:49] Charging your iPhone overnight is 60 times that of writing a progress note in your private practice. So I’d have to get the study for you. It’s an amazing comparison and I even put together like this really cool infographic, maybe I’ll just give that to you. That shows a comparison to the day-to-day stuff.
[00:04:08] So literally, I think it came out too, you could write 600 notes for the amount of energy it takes to stream two hours, a two hour Netflix movie, 600 progress though? That’s like a whole year’s. Like I don’t, I can’t do the math therapist can’t do that. Right? But how many else is that? I’d like to just dispel that myth right off.
[00:04:26] Once I read that study, I was like. This is incredible. Let’s, okay. If you’re really concerned, don’t stream Netflix. Get rid of Netflix, and use AI to write your notes so you’re not burning out, trying to keep up with your clinical documentation. That’s my take on it right now.
[00:04:39] Lisa: And then when you save all that time from using your AI mental health note taker, I guess you’re not watching Netflix anymore, but maybe you’re going outside and you’re going for a
[00:04:47] Kym: ride
[00:04:49] Lisa: doing some really amazing self-care.
[00:04:51] You’re not just Netflix and Chill or, or whatever. People do. But I do love me some Netflix. I mean, I gotta on same. I love it. but I understand, I think that there’s a lot of fear around environment and I’m so glad that you shared that. ’cause I think that’s, that kind of puts my mind at ease too.
[00:05:06] What about the myth of AI is going to make us obsolete? Our jobs are gonna go away. We won’t have job security.
[00:05:12] Kym: I hate to say this, but I think there’s a little bit of truth to that in a lot of ways. There was just a study, I have a weekly newsletter that I send out for AI tech updates, that sort of thing.
[00:05:22] There was a study about, I think the A PA put it on it was CBT, and it was basically saying that the AI delivery of the CBT skills was more effectively or more effective for the delivery than a therapist delivering the same skills. So they compared the two, A therapist delivering an ai, delivering the skills and like the patient satisfaction reports that came back were saying that the AI delivery was way more effective for them.
[00:05:49] I just posted about that in my free AI Facebook group too, just to get a consensus about what are people thinking? And really what’s happening is AI is replacing those things that we can do, like those skills that we were teaching, psychoeducational type stuff. DBT skills, all of that stuff, AI’s replacing that.
[00:06:07] So as therapists, we have to pivot, in my mind, it’s more about the relationship, it’s more about things like somatic processing, doing a couple’s therapy where an AI can’t really get in there and navigate the nuances of two people arguing in your office. That’s gonna be hard for AI to. So I think therapists that are relying on any kind of like psychoeducation or like rote clinical interventions, they are probably gonna become more obsolete.
[00:06:32] So I think right now is a time for therapists to really focus on how am I gonna dig in and get some really important skills in my tool belt that I can market to clients and still get them to come in that AI’s never gonna be able to replace.
[00:06:45] Lisa: I saw your your email about that thought. That was really interesting because. Or maybe it was in your group, I read it somewhere, but you were saying like, this is information. However, what the chat or what the AI didn’t do was pick up on those relational cues didn’t pick up on the feeling behind maybe what the person was saying. So it’s while it’s, wow, that’s amazing. It’s also, if you’re really good at doing those parts of being, those things as a therapist, relational, really good at building rapport and the that type of skills, hopefully.
[00:07:19] Our jobs will be here in the future. I like to think that I really do. And also too, I have to, everybody says, well, and everybody, you hear a lot that there’s this huge mental health problem, huge mental health crisis we have all these mental health practitioners out there, but yet people are still not getting their mental health needs met.
[00:07:37] And so when you put that out there and these big companies go, oh, we’ll help solve that problem. So how do we do that? How do we reduce the cost of mental health treatment? And eventually I do think that there’s going to be, I don’t know if it’s FDA approved type of first line of defense mental health AI out there, that insurance companies are going to say, try this first before we send you to an actual human being.
[00:08:03] I really think that’s coming. What do you, is that, am I
[00:08:05] Kym: already? Are it there already are. There are. It was a newsletter maybe a couple months ago now, but there are FDA approved AI devices. Are measuring everything from the conversations you’re having with your friends all day long to your biometrics, like heart rate increasing and that sort of thing.
[00:08:22] You can go into the app and report mood and all of that, and there are actually billing codes now that you can bill for AI assisted devices if you’re integrating that into your clinical work with your clients. Now, the insurance companies aren’t necessarily paying for that because just because the code exists doesn’t mean that they’re gonna pay for it, but.
[00:08:40] It’s already a thing. There’s already these devices that are FDA approved and they are run by AI to track all of that. The way that works for therapists is figuring out which ones are these. How do I get on these platforms, which you can, and how do I integrate that into my treatment plan with my clients?
[00:08:57] And then you can bill for these services supposedly is the thought process around it. But it’s already here. There’s already AI that could like pick up voice deflection or like changes in your tone, that sort of thing, to be able to pick up on mood shifts within the session. Yeah, it’s coming. And that’s why I always say this.
[00:09:16] It’s not gonna replace therapists, but it’s gonna replace therapists that aren’t integrating AI into their practice in some way. It’s another thing when the insurance company, this is getting off topic, but they are now deploying AI auditors. So the AI auditors are auditing our notes and wrapping this back around to Berries.
[00:09:33] Berries has an audit proof note in there, and you can even set up your template however you want to in Berries, but set it up so the note is written perfectly every time. Mm-hmm. For these AI auditors, they’re coming in and they’re just scanning for certain things. If you’re just like willy-nilly with your documentation or not following a really good format, you’re, you might suffer a clawback from the insurance companies, especially now that AI’s on board with the audits.
[00:09:57] Lisa: And also, I know I mentioned earlier about that AI is getting all of this data and they’re companies are harvesting or whatever the word would be, harvesting the data and like selling it to other companies. And that was something that I was really concerned with in the beginning and I asked a lot ’cause I get.
[00:10:16] People, companies who wanna sponsor the show. And so I would ask the question every time, what do you do with this data? And always the answer was, it does not get stored. It gets deleted right away. We never see it. We would have to have a consent form and we would have to have all these things that you would have to agree to and you would be signing.
[00:10:34] So it’s, they’re like, we’re not gonna do that ’cause we would lose our business. Right. And if I only wrap my head around that, okay, I believe them and I trust that they’re telling us that. I just have to put my faith in that. And then I realized like we have so many consent forms that we have to sign that yeah, we would have to be signing away all of these consents and all these agreements that they could take this and harvest it and sell it and do what they wanna do.
[00:10:57] So what do you, is it, am I missing anything with that, that you can
[00:11:00] Kym: No, that’s exactly it. And in fact, one of the whole trainings is basically talking about that free CE that we’re giving away. At Berries. It talks about how do you vet an AI platform, like basically it’s a checklist for vetting. What happens to the recording with Berries?
[00:11:15] Of course the recording gets deleted, the transcript is saved, it generates the notes from that toggle off. If you want everything to be be deleted after a certain amount of time, after 30 days with Barry. So there’s a lot of safeguards in place. It’s SOC two certified security level, HIPAA compliant, all of that.
[00:11:29] It’s as secure as any EHR where we’re putting client information. A lot of therapists just don’t realize that and really. The real problem comes in when they’re using things like chat, GPT. I’m gonna write a, I’m gonna write a progress note. It’s gonna be totally de-identified, but still that data is being used by open AI or Anthropic or whoever you’re trying to write your note inside of it, unless you go into the settings and literally toggle off.
[00:11:56] Don’t use this information for training your model if you don’t turn that off. Even de-identified stuff is going to be like, it’s gonna be picking up on your like interventions and protocols and all of that. So that is training the model on how to be a better therapist. But things like varies is not,
[00:12:12] Lisa: yeah.
[00:12:13] Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, cool. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about burnout. So this is something that, I know that you started talking about this in your emails and on your podcast and that just put my ears up ’cause I’m all about not being burned out. So how does AI help to reduce our burnout as therapists?
[00:12:32] Kym: There’s so many levels to this. So just generally, we could talk about AI and helping with the admin stuff that doesn’t even have to do with clients. Email templates, paperwork templates, marketing, creating social media content for you, writing blog posts, all of those things. It can make it so much quicker and easier.
[00:12:52] I’m getting ready to do an episode of my own podcast about this, like they’re all, the ais now have what they call computer. Computer takes over your computer and literally does all this for you. If you set up the right workflows, it will pull your brand. It’ll from your website, pull your brand. It’ll do whatever skill you want it to do.
[00:13:10] Write a blog post. It’ll then take it over to your WordPress site. If you tell it how to do that and give it the login information, it’ll upload it and publish it for you. It’ll literally do all of that while you’re walking on the beach or whatever. Which is amazing. The other day I was literally sitting on the beach and it edited it, used a program on my computer called DS Script.
[00:13:29] It edited a video, like a raw video. I had uploaded it, it was like a huge video and it was gonna take two hours to upload. And I was like, I’m not waiting for this. So I went, did my thing, was down on the beach and it used the AI tools inside of DS script to edit my video for me, which is just insane. And I was not even at my computer.
[00:13:46] So it helps with that. That’s such a load off
[00:13:48] Lisa: for burnout.
[00:13:50] Kym: Then when you’re in session with your clients, it’s, it’s, I don’t even know how to explain it, but it’s essentially, you know how when you’re with a client, you’re always thinking in the back of your mind, okay, I gotta remember that. Yeah. I gotta make sure I document that.
[00:14:00] I gotta remember the dosage on that medication. I’ve gotta make sure what’s her grandmother’s name? Yeah. Gr. You’ve gotta remember all these details. So you’re always like half in and half out. Most therapists that I talk to report this, like I, I’m listening, I’m involved, but I’m also thinking like, how am I gonna document this?
[00:14:16] So knowing that Berries or some AI is running in the background, like literally recording every bit of it, you no longer have to remember that stuff anymore. Then if you have a template that is already searching for affect sleep, it’s listening for that. So if it, if they say, oh, I’m not sleeping, it’s already pulled that into the note, you’re not gonna have to remember those details at all.
[00:14:38] So it gives us room and space to be just like totally present with our clients, which to me is, is the best part about it. It totally reduces that like. Cognitive load is what I like to call that. It’s like a cognitive load where you’re always having to worry about what am I gonna do with this information later?
[00:14:56] Okay, now I did that, but now my stupid insur, the insurance company requires me to send like a PCP letter every three months. With Berries, you don’t have to, you just literally click a button and it writes a summary letter for a PCP, and you just email it off through their secure portal. Just like that.
[00:15:12] Those are just a couple example, and there’s so many more examples. I could think of how it helps with that, but yeah, that’s, yeah.
[00:15:18] Lisa: Yeah, really, I’m thinking of so many things too, how I use it and how it makes. What I do so much easier. I hadn’t thought about letting, walking away from editing the video and doing something, I have to look at what your workflow is for that, because I use script also, but I.
[00:15:35] I use the tools in there because it just makes it go so much faster and it just helps so much. But I’m just like, oh, what does that look like when you walk away and you come back and it’s edited for you? So
[00:15:44] Kym: literally, Claude Cowork is, it lives on your desktop and you literally go and say, this is, you could even voice it like, this is my workflow.
[00:15:52] I want you to come up with a solution. Integrate it into our day to day, our daily task or whatever. Or every time there’s a new video that uploads, I’m just gonna come in here and tell you, and I want you to do your thing. Mm-hmm. So you give it an SOP essentially what’s it’s called skills Now. You give it a skill and it knows what to do.
[00:16:09] Yeah. And you give it to your agent and your agent knows what to do. And with these skills now, which is what I’m teaching next month in my memberships. These skills, you can take them and put them into any AI now and they already know your S-A-P-S-O-P, so you don’t have to go and reprogram anymore.
[00:16:24] Lisa: Okay.
[00:16:24] So in the, in the actual training that you do, the four part training, there’s, you talk about what AI looks like in a practice and you do cover like four different areas. You cover documentation, which you’ve already gone over, practice operations. Marketing visibility and I think professional development.
[00:16:40] What, that’s a lot that people could start to use AI for in their day-to-day or their business. If you were to pick one, what, where would you start? Like how would you, if someone’s new to ai, like what’s the lowest risk but highest impact place for a therapist to begin? I guess a lot depends on where they are in their business and what they wanna accomplish, but do you have any suggestions or ideas for that?
[00:17:05] Kym: Yeah, and I should give this to your listeners. I created a, a therapist time study tool essentially that it’s free. You go in and like literally for a week, you would just document everything you’re doing every 15 minutes to get a really good picture of, and I programmed the app essentially to give you like updates and summaries on.
[00:17:26] Where you’re wasting your time, essentially. Mm-hmm. And then it summarizes and says, this looks like something you could hand off to a va, or this is something AI could do for you. It gives you a roadmap already based on the time study. If you don’t use that app, you could do a spreadsheet or whatever, write down, do a time study of where your biggest time sucks are really, and then do an honest look like in my checking my email like 15 times a day and answering the same question over and over again.
[00:17:50] If the answer is yes, based on your own time study, there is an AI to help you with that. So I would say identify your biggest time suck, and then figure out which AI would help you the most. For most therapists, obviously it’s documentation, all that stuff that comes with it. So of course I would say go do it 30 day free trial of berries to see how much it could help you in your business.
[00:18:10] But if you’re like, no, I’ve got my documentation dialed in, but this is the thing that’s really killing me. There’s an AI tool for it. You could email me and I will tell you like, this is the tool you use for that. Like Lisa and I mentioned D Script. It saves so much time for video, like content creation and editing and that sort of thing.
[00:18:27] Lisa: Yeah.
[00:18:27] Kym: There’s a tool like that for every time suck essentially.
[00:18:30] Lisa: Yeah. I remember we, I taught not too long ago, and you were sharing with me, or maybe it was listening to one of your episodes, but about how you use AI to help you create one of your newsletters, and I thought that was fascinating.
[00:18:42] Kym: Yes.
[00:18:43] Lisa: Yeah, so it’s ’cause you have an AI and mental health newsletter.
[00:18:46] Is that the
[00:18:47] Kym: Yeah.
[00:18:47] Lisa: Okay. Yeah. And so one Once and you, I love your newsletters, but I think that’s my favorite one that you have where you give, you give an overview of the latest AI and mental health information out there. You do like an overview, and the way you told me you did that was fascinating. You have all these agents or these, I don’t know if it’s a Zapier or an agent, but you have all these things set up.
[00:19:07] It combs the internet for you and comes back and then it gives you an email. I mean, it’s just crazy how you,
[00:19:12] Kym: yeah,
[00:19:13] Lisa: so I, I just want people to get creative with it. If you have an email or a newsletter or a blog that you write, it doesn’t always have to be clinical work. It can be in your marketing. It can be in your operations.
[00:19:24] It can be, when you’re talking about emails, responding to emails, maybe you get email requests all the time. People inquiring if you have openings. People have like autoresponder, but what if you had something set up that wasn’t just an autoresponder, it took it to the next level for you and actually made that appointment for that consultation or however you wanna do it.
[00:19:44] So I think it’s fascinating.
[00:19:47] Kym: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:19:48] Lisa: Really wild.
[00:19:48] Kym: And what you’re talking about already exists. I don’t know if Uriah, Gilford, I think you do. Yeah. Uriah’s got an AI receptionist right now that you can go to his website. The productive therapist.com. You can go to his website and literally he’s got like demos of the AI receptionist that he’s created that does take those steps for you.
[00:20:05] It’s like replacing an intake person, like that frontline person, so you never miss a call again. And it gets the people scheduled, like with smart AI routing.
[00:20:13] Lisa: Wow.
[00:20:14] Kym: Yeah.
[00:20:15] Lisa: I, oh, that’s maybe where I heard of it. I heard him talk about it on your podcast. ’cause you guys Yeah, that’s probably what it was. Yeah.
[00:20:20] Okay. So I’ll put that link in the show notes as well because that’s, that is just really cool. What, are there other things out there that you’ve heard about that are coming from other therapists where they just go, oh they’re, I can create that, or, I think that’s really neat.
[00:20:31] Kym: Oh, from other therapists? The newsletter one is a big one because it’s not really scraping the internet, it’s scraping Google alerts that I’ve already set up in my Gmail.
[00:20:40] Oh, that’s what it’s scraping. So if you have like a specialty. Your practice or an audience that you’re trying to make newsletters for? That would be my advice. Set up Google alerts, and now you don’t even need, like I’ve got the Zapier agent that’s communicating with this other thing and is CRE with my Gmail and is creating these drafts and it’s making it look like a pretty newsletter and all that.
[00:20:59] But really AI is so good. Now, you don’t even need prompts. You literally go to the agent, whichever one you want. Say, this is what I want you to do. And it will, it will tell you exactly what the workflow is. It now it has access to our computers. It’ll go on your computer and connect all the correct things to the agent.
[00:21:18] So it just already knows how to do all this for you. Yeah,
[00:21:22] Lisa: it’s just wild. I never thought that we would be here, and here we are. It’s just crazy. Yeah. So what should therapists never outsource to ai? What do you think?
[00:21:33] Kym: So I feel like therapists should never outsource, like your personal relationship or your own oversight in anything that you’re doing.
[00:21:42] ’cause really these agents, that workflow I was saying, they, it would literally go and automated and it actually has done that for me. And I, I haven’t even asked it to. In fact, I tell it not to. And the other day it posted a Facebook post in my Facebook group without me approving it first. Which I went back and yelled at it.
[00:22:00] I was like, don’t ever do that again. But it literally opened up my Facebook group, put it in, made it look pretty, all of that, and then hit a post, and it posted it in my group. And I didn’t even realize it was in there for a while, which was fine. It was okay, but still. So I guess my big advice with that would be don’t ever lose your oversight for any of this stuff.
[00:22:20] Blog posts, newsletters, email templates, email responses, because it can all be automated now with ai. But in my opinion, it’s not good enough to not check it. And then of course, with actually like using berries or something like berries is amazing. But you want to double check the note that it’s writing because AI hallucinates, right?
[00:22:42] So if your template looks for sleep, you’re in berries and the client doesn’t mention sleep. The AI is like so smart, it wants to help us and wants to fill in the blank. So it’s gonna say. Oh, slept eight to 10 hours, and you’re like, they didn’t say anything about how well they were sleeping. So you have to always like still use your clinical judgment, your professional judgment to be an overseer of everything that these ais are doing for you.
[00:23:05] Lisa: Makes sense? Yeah, that’s really important. Super important. I’m fascinated by what program is actually going into your Facebook group and posting for you. Like Claude. Oh, okay. I see. I don’t have CLA yet. I don’t have Claude yet. I need to look it’s next level. Level. Yeah. I know you said that so many times and I just keep putting it off, but I think that would probably help with my burnout.
[00:23:25] ’cause I get so tired of posting on social media if I could just give that task to somebody. But that’s really amazing that it can do that.
[00:23:33] Kym: The only thing it can’t figure out is, you know how these viral posts on Facebook, right? Like you do like a hook and you have to go in the comments to read the comments.
[00:23:41] Like it can’t figure out how to like. Actually, that’s probably not true ’cause I was trying to get it to schedule a whole week’s worth. It can do that. If you give it the right instructions, it can post in your group for you. So your workflow, Lisa, it’d be like you edit something in DS script. You’ve got the podcast ready.
[00:23:55] You could have Claude pull the transcript or the shorts from DS script and go post them over on Facebook for you if you wanted it to, or tell it to write a summary. Go to your business page and post the summary without even your oversight. Now you could totally do that.
[00:24:11] Lisa: Wow. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So we’re on social media, but we’re not on social media.
[00:24:15] Kym: Now there is a way, I have seen a wave where like people are craving authenticity, so it’s almost like it’s going back the other way. It’s like they want just raw, like no professional looking things. They just want like the real raw, authentic humans. And I think that might become more and more important as this goes on too.
[00:24:32] Yeah. They have what’s called AI slop where everything sounds the same.
[00:24:35] Lisa: Yeah, yeah. No, I can see it. I see it in when I use AI to help me write a post or something. I know it’s, it sounds like every other post, but. Sometimes I just honestly just don’t care because I’m so over social media. But I just, I don’t know.
[00:24:48] I feel like I just am so over social media. I just want, I just wanna talk to people. But it’s also, it’s a necessary evil you have to have a presence to because you have to, you can’t really avoid it. So any who, that’s a whole other podcast probably. So what would you say to the therapist listening who is still unsure about taking that first step of trying ai?
[00:25:11] Maybe wants to, but is hesitant
[00:25:14] Kym: right now, I’m obsessed with Claude. This changes for me because literally these ai, like one week Claude’s the best. The next week it’s chat, GPT. The next week it’s Gemini. The next week it’s Manus, but just go to one of them. Right now I’d recommend Claude probably and just go in and literally say to the ai, what can you help me with?
[00:25:31] Just start right there. It’s gonna walk you through it. Tell me about yourself. And then you could easily drop your website link and say, go look at my website. It’ll go out, look at your website, come back and say, oh, I see you’re a therapist that likes to travel and blah, blah, blah. And then say, okay, how can you help me?
[00:25:45] And it’s gonna deep dive with you into how it can help you with all its capabilities.
[00:25:50] Lisa: So you just have to open it up and start talking to it. Yes. So what do you think? If a therapist completely ignores AI for the next two to three years, what do you think will happen for that therapist?
[00:26:03] Kym: There’s always gonna be room for a therapist.
[00:26:04] Mm-hmm. And there’s always gonna be clients that hate ai, so I feel like. Those people will still be together. But I also think that the world’s changing, think Sam Altman just released a stat, basically, I think it’s 8 million people a week, hit chat, GBT for mental health advice. Wow. And I’m seeing this in the Facebook groups.
[00:26:23] All the therapists are talking about, I cannot keep my client caseload full. I can’t. So I feel like it’s because. Clients are going to AI instead. So I fully believe therapists have to have more than one income stream in this day and age. They have to learn how to scale and sell their expertise on a mass scale.
[00:26:43] This is just my opinion. AI makes it so easy to do that. Tomorrow I’m hosting a training around using AI to build a sales page in 30 minutes or less. Mm-hmm. It’s so easy now to have an idea, have expertise, have these things that you teach your clients over and over again. Turn it into products that you can sell to the rest of the world, because I do feel like AI is causing this problem with therapists not being as booked out as they used to be.
[00:27:10] I really do think that’s part of it. Yeah.
[00:27:12] Lisa: Yeah.
[00:27:12] Kym: I think therapists that don’t use AI at all, they’re gonna fall behind and they’re not gonna be able to make a full living with the way AI is like supplementing mental health care. In my opinion. It’s doomsday ish. I really feel that way.
[00:27:27] Lisa: Yeah. It’s the reality of what’s happening to our field and to our profession.
[00:27:31] I was just, I see it in the Facebook groups where people are saying they’re not able to fill their caseload anymore. It’s a temperature reading on our culture and our society. People are churning, and I understand. I, I. Look, when this is a, an example, when I want a recipe, I go to ChatGPT and I go, this is what I got.
[00:27:50] Tell me what to make. Versus Googling chicken recipes, you know, that’s different than finding a therapist, but it’s a quicker, faster way to getting my needs met and
[00:27:59] Kym: yeah,
[00:28:00] Lisa: exactly. It’s happening. And I do think we same. We need to be aware, and I think that it’s important to talk about those things because nobody wants to be blindsided, but you know, it’s, it’s coming.
[00:28:12] So with that being said, I wanna go over just the modules real quick of this free CE course that you have created this webinar. So the first module is AI Essentials for Mental Health Professionals. The second module is trust, HIPAA ethics and Boundaries. Third is practical ways to use AI in your practice.
[00:28:31] And then the fourth is a case study of how you use berries and you show it in real time, like you show how to use it. You show what it’s applicable for, how it works. So all of those modules are available for free. Even if you don’t want the CE credit hour, you can still watch all of this for free. I know.
[00:28:48] I’m so excited to partner with Berries to be the course administrator. And you guys know that Muster Consulting is a approved NBCC ASEP provider and the courses that are not. Approved are definitely listed on the site, but pretty much everything on my site is a CE course, but there’s gonna be more Berries Academy training in the future.
[00:29:06] It’s really cool that they’re doing this.
[00:29:08] Kym: Yep.
[00:29:08] Lisa: Yeah.
[00:29:08] Kym: Free CEEs. Yeah, they’re amazing. They just wanna give back. They really do. So I’m, and we’re glad you’re in a part, you’re a partner too.
[00:29:16] Lisa: I love working with them and they’re so open to ideas. And if you guys have ideas for what you would like a continuing education course on, you can reach out to me or Kym or even Berries and let them know.
[00:29:26] I know the next one they’re working on. I don’t wanna give it away yet ’cause I know it’s in the works, but I think everybody’s gonna love it. Um, and then I have some ideas too. So Kym, thank you so much. I’ll put all the links that you have. In the show notes. So it’s
[00:29:40] Kym: a lot.
[00:29:41] Lisa: People wanna listen to all your podcasts or join your groups or your memberships or just get more Kym in their life, which I highly recommend because you’re such, um, a genuine, authentic, creative, and inspiring person to know.
[00:29:53] So thank you so much for being here.
[00:29:56] Kym: Thank you for having me.