PART FOUR: Dear Parents, ChatGPT Makes For A Fine Parent-Trainer

An untrained monkey can do my job. As in the quirky little jungle animals who have managed to escape all forms of psychological research testing and live their lives swinging and eating bugs off of each other’s ears.Others in my field disagree, and that’s fine. If you’ve been a reader for the past 3 years of this publication, you know I support the right to hold any opinion, no matter how inaccurate or delusional I deem it to be. These same people find my views equally inaccurate and delusional.Thanks for reading honestly unorthodox.! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Considering the moot point that my job has become, I’ve been researching the use of AI in K-12 education, in academia, and even in human service fields. I’d hate for this to imply I’m in support of robots standing at the front of classrooms, or hunks of twisted steel consoling our children with their cold, dead, robot hands. It simply means that replacing more impractical jobs (like mine) with features of artificial intelligence may lessen the tax-dollar burden and, more broadly, teach our very-demanding clients skills at rates we cannot. Right now, we’re limited by our inefficiency. Instead of shifting efforts toward prevention and basic psychoeducation, which could reach millions of people through channels like social media or Zoom, we clamor to fix a patient’s problems and play Mom. Inefficient AND irrational.There are only so many glorified-babysitter-monkeys to go around, after all. Services can be cheap, fast, or high-quality; they cannot be all three. But two of them pay a pretty penny. I believe in your ability to determine which duo grants the greatest payout.To be clear, I didn’t prance into this field of behavior analysis expecting my job to be that of glorified babysitter or primate aide. None of us did. I also don’t think any of us could have predicted just how powerful AI could be in lessening the administrative side of clinical work, or that it even had a place in industries like behavioral health. Consider this scenario, which is one I’m currently in:A behavioral provider is given a caseload of 20+ people. They’re tasked with training their staff on best practices for managing behavior, which can often be dangerous (we’re talking regular calls to the police because of clients attacking staff and destroying property). Each client has three separate shifts of people working with them at their group home (overnight, day, and evening), and receive round-the-clock care (because of their disability, they’re unable to live independently, and typically require constant supervision for even basic everyday tasks.) You, as the behavior consultant, are expected to be present and resourceful for every single team, for every single client. And you’re on-call for the several crises that occur week to week, which range from clients throwing rocks at cars, concussing their staff, or taking their clothes off and masturbating in public. Impossible, right? Wait, there’s more!On top of managing the names and roles of 60+ people, you’re also required to drive to each of their group homes for “visits”. These “visits” are comprised of hurried venting sessions, or loitering in the living room while the clients sit in their own slop, rotting away on their unwashed sheets in their bedroom. If you’re lucky, you can get 5-6 clients in one home so you’re limited to, at most, 4 different places to manage. If you’re unlucky, they’re geographically spread out, across different towns and counties and with varying availability. Your role has been upgraded to that of scheduling coordinator, crisis manager, traveling babysitter, and sounding post for underpaid people. Is this efficient? Is this “support”? Is this even “compassion”? If your head is spinning thinking about how you’d stay sane amidst this lunacy, please consider AI.For families that need more specific support, it’s worth tinkering with apps like ChatGPT. Below I’ve added a screenshot of both the sample prompt I’ve given and the DIY treatment plan it provides. What I especially love about the use of AI is its speed and its insistence on the client completing the necessary steps before demanding more intensive intervention. One of the greatest missteps of mental and behavioral health services is our urgency in responding to supposed issues. Any time we overreact to a problem a person is widely capable of managing on their own, we convey a singular message: this issue needs professional expertise. Why grapple with critical thinking when you can hire a professional?Instead of waiting for outsourced guidance, create your own curriculum with the help of AI. Within the prompt you give it (I’d be happy to assist with this!), you can request forms of experiments and homework assignments that you’d like to complete related to what your challenge is. Again, I’ve included samples of this below.In these prompts, users can provide additional specifics about their challenges: the length of time the problem has occurred, how the intensity has changed over time, environmental factors affecting the problems growth, how long they’d like to commit to a treatment plan, and how many times per week they’ll devote to the given interventions. Yes, I recognize this can feel a tad cold and transactional compared to in-person support. And it’s certainly not without its flaws. But perhaps this leads to a greater issue: what about professional support do we think is superior to engagement with our communities, with our own skill-building, with our friends and family? What do we believe we’re receiving that senior to those basic resources which got us this far in the plight of humanity?I’m not making the argument that this could work for every psychiatric problem. But it could be, dare I say life-changing, for those whose interventions are based largely on common sense, structure, and habit change. Which is most people, even those mentally ill.I’d also like to pique your curiosity as it relates to licensure. We fear the outcome of incompetent providers being that of traumatizing clients. A person who sifts through the sandcastles in your mind, who has not been trained to do so, can certainly cause some considerable harm. But consider what your therapy sessions, if you’ve had them, are comprised of. They’re meant to be very acute (3-6 months), the therapist mostly reflects back to you what you’re saying, and provides more balanced and alternative explanations for the irrationality and the theatrics. Frankly, a licensed and supposedly trained staff is still capable of tainting your psyche. Licensure isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, and I profoundly hope people begin realizing that.I do wholly support the idea of an unbiased person helping us make sense of our learned behaviors and faulty thoughts. I’ve had wonderful experiences with therapists. But my favorite one was a person who ended up in jail for operating as a psychotherapist without a psychotherapist license. I didn’t feel duped, and my family still adored her--- because she was just really great at teaching me how to think. You don’t need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in a Master’s education to do that.Aside from a small portion of the population who could use more specialized type of treatment delivered by clinically trained psychologists, many just need to adopt sounder habits, modify their lifestyle, and consistently practice tips and tricks to think differently about their problems. I imagine this is the reason behind James Clear’s continued success with Atomic Habits. It’s this easy to modify how we behave? Yes, it is. Do we need to constrain access to this sort of intervention through bureaucratic licensure requirements? I think not. If you’d like to understand how this looks in a K-12 setting, research Alpha Schools. They utilize a 2-hour learning model in which AI tailors fast-paced instruction for each academic subject to 25 minutes, analyzing a learner’s trend of correct to incorrect responding, their rate of skill development and generalization, and even how long they pause in between test questions. It’s unmatched in terms of individualized education.Alpha Schools also don’t require teaching licenses, as their staff serve the students in the psychological and motivational sense (since AI is doing the teaching). With this model, any adult highly skilled in niche areas can develop life-skills workshops for the students to attend, and they’re entirely unconstrained by the red tape of teaching licenses and certifications or education laws. Entirely captivated by how to code websites for Fortune 500 companies? You can teach tech-minded students to do so without having to take out a student loan to become a licensed educator. Are you like me and captivated by the intersection of physical fitness and mental wellbeing? Produce a webinar that demonstrates how this method works.With this model (that is, eliminating the excessive, often pointless licensure requirements), imagine how many more people could be helped on a global scale. Currently, waitlists are crawling up to years-long for many therapeutic services, with psychotherapy, psychiatry, and behavioral intervention bearing the brunt of the delay. Further, more and more families who cannot afford private insurance must depend on Medicaid, which the majority of practices do not take because of very low and very delayed reimbursement.AI is the common denominator, at least I think, in resolving many of these daunting problems. I asked you guys how you felt about leveraging AI in therapeutic fields, and many people had their doubts and their concerns. I share these same concerns, as I was a person just a couple of years ago that thought using AI in fields like academia, education, and even mental health services was a sign of laziness. My mind has entirely changed after seeing the horribly low quality of in-person service. Consider the below steps in “revolutionizing” mental healthcare.1. Intake processes are all conducted through AI; prospective clients do not need to schedule appointments 6 months out and do not need to go anywhere2. Screening tools as part of the intake process can be used to outline what services each client would benefit from (instead of just giving each person the maximum hours)3. Predictive analytics can be used to determine engagement on the part of the client, and can tailor interventions and support in real-time4. Highly competent coaches can review the data provided by AI should the person still seek more one-to-one, human-based support (psychology degree not necessary)5. Use of AI can be leveraged in schools, workplaces, and larger organizations to better support entire groups in learning how to manage their own behavior/mental wellbeingThe best way to fix our nation’s “declining mental health”? Stop trying to fix it.Thanks for reading honestly unorthodox.! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit honestlyunorthodox.substack.com