While AI has proven profoundly useful for complex problem solving in disciplines in which there are complex rules and laws, such as engineering and weather prediction, it has nonetheless proven itself inept at management, addictive when it comes to mimicking friendship and intimacy, and lethal when used for counseling.

AI remains unlicensed, and as such has been banned as a counseling resource in an increasing number of States.

There are a number of reasons for these failures, but all appear at this time to be structural and thus uncorrectable flaws. For example, AI’s inevitable ‘hallucinating’ appears intrinsic to its function, such that at some point AI will mimic psychosis.

You don’t want a crazy therapist encouraging you to kill yourself, as the families of those currently suing AI companies have endured. AI has not done it's own analysis.

Ultimately, AI does not recognize ‘personhood’ (it is relatable only as an abstract concept) and there is no person behind AI for you to address, none to reply to your call.

Automated Imitation is incapable of mimicking effective counseling and psychotherapy.

Cognitive behavioral therapy and its more fashionable derivates such as DBT are simplified derivatives of Transactional Analysis, one of the original and still most powerful models for considering the dynamics of our behavior and how these enact repetitions by which we feel trapped and unfulfilled.

Unlike manualized and standardized CBT-based practices, powerful TA concepts such as Game and Script theories continue to be developed today by thoughtful and insightful practitioners who Psychamerica guides in our role as teaching and supervising analyst.

CBT-based counseling is rooted in an implicit demand for you to align yourself with the image of an ideal 'unit of production', and to comply with that which is excepted of you as a productive citizen.No wonder it was adopted decades ago by the Russian and Chinese political prisoner rehabilitation projects.

Psychamerica regards such attempts at conditioning and conforming as opposed to our core values, echoing the kind of homogenization that is the cause of the alienation so many of us endure.

Rather, psychoanalysis, a preparation for which Eric Berne developed TA from the outset, aims to articulate the truth of our authentic desires, desires which by definition have been forgotten in order to conform in the past, thus freeing us from the tyranny of the demand to comply.

CBT is a pale shadow by comparison.

These services once acted as an occasionally effective supplement to psychotherapy, and even sufficed for a short time for those living in parts of the world where counseling and psychotherapy is hard to access.

Unfortunately, such services have been bought up by conglomerates that are drivent only by the maxim of increased profits, replacing counselors-in-training with automated text-based programs and AI.

Furthermore, some insurance companies are attempting to force in-network clients to go through these programs before prior authorization for counseling or psychotherapy is granted. At the moment such requirements are deemed illegal.

Even where the online counselor is human, they are likely in training, and likely barely supervised. As such, you will need to exercise caution, requiring checks on the counselor’s status, training and supervision, a checking that too often forges an anxiety and suspicion at the heart of what should be a trusted engagement.

Psychamerica's Paul Kellett van Leer is a highly accredited, experienced and qualified practioner. His licensure ensuress that you have recourse to an oversight that is sadly lacking in the case of automated services.