Scaling up your practice as an individual practitioner comes with many challenges, including the risk of burnout. But imagine if you had an avatar that looked and sounded just like you and was programmed with every response you’ve ever given to a client, as well as everything you learned in your training and CPD. Would your potential number of clients then become unlimited? If your gut response to this is that it will never happen you may be misinformed, according to Matthias Barker. In his ‘Big issue’ article, ‘Ready or not… AI is here’, he argues that therapists ignore AI at their peril. He shares his extraordinary story of investing thousands of his own money creating an AI-enabled therapy bot programmed to operate as a virtual version of himself, only to pull the plug on the project at the last minute in what he calls his ‘Oppenheimer’ moment. His concern wasn’t that the AI-enabled therapist wouldn’t be good enough but that it would be too good, and put him, and other practitioners, out of a job. Don’t miss that thought-provoking account courtesy of the fantastic US publication Psychotherapy Networker – thanks to editor Livia Kent for her generosity in sharing it with Therapy Today readers.
We also have a report from a team of UK researchers on therapists’ experiences of the transition to working remotely. Reading their findings, it struck me how much I have come to accept as the ‘new normal’, such as clients taking their session from a different place depending on where they are that day, including (if necessary) walking outside. I’m sure I’m not the only practitioner who has had to deal with interruptions, less than perfect signals and restricted views of the client. Often we don’t know what obstacles we may be faced with before the session starts. I tell myself that my flexibility and adaptability in coping with this is in service of providing the client with a session they need. But the authors of our ‘Best practice’ piece, ‘Online therapy: what we know now’, raise an important issue – have we as a profession given enough consideration to the consequences of accepting such wholesale changes to the way we work? I’d love to hear your views and experiences of this – email therapytoday@thinkpublishing.co.uk
Sally Brown Editor
