MentalHealthBench

In the United States at least there’s a huge lack of mental health professionals, they’re expensive, insurance goes out of their way to make it inaccessible, and wait times for appointments can be months out. For psychiatrists in some regions there are zero that accept insurance and there can be a six or longer month wait. Many regions have no inpatient beds or any sort.

My parents are clinical psychologists with 40 years experience, and they both agree LLMs could be a great boon to many many unserved people if made well. They think this is a wonderful avenue of research. But agree in the moment it’s not ready. I think the ethics of allowing people to suffer due to economics while ignoring a technology that can help them is worse, no? Telling them to seek a health professional when none are available is worse ?

The transcripts of mental health professionals could likely have an improvement in the baseline below-average experiences of most folks with such supports.

In other words, mental health professionals will resist this technology to replace them until they realize they can put it in front of people like a new kind of web form, at which time the same will become amazing and wonderful.

At the very least, a tool like this could serve as an anti-virus and firewall for poor and harmful experiences from mental health professionals towards clients.