I tried therapy once and it was terrible. The ones I got were based on some not very scientific stuff like Freudian and mostly just sat there and didn't say anything. At least with an LLM type therapist you could AB test different ones to see what was effective. It would be quite easy to give an LLM instructions to discourage suicide and get them to look on the bright side. In fact I made a "GPT" "relationship therapist" with OpenAI in about five minutes but just giving it a sensible article on relationships and saying advise this.
With humans it's very non standardised and hard to know what you'll get or it it'll work.
CBT (cognitive behavioural training) has been shown to be effective independent of which therapist does it. if CBT has a downside it is that it's a bit boring, and probably not as effective as a good therapist
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so personally i would say the advice of passing on people to therapists is largely unsupported: if you're that person's friend and you care about them; then be open, and show that care. that care can also mean taking them to a therapist, that is okay
Yeah. Also at the time I tried it what I really needed was common sense advice like move out of mum's, get a part time job to meet people and so on. While you could argue it's not strictly speaking therapy, I imagine a lot of people going to therapists could benefit from that kind of thing.
> It would be quite easy to give an LLM instructions to discourage suicide
This assumes the person talking to the LLM is in a coherent state of mind and asks the right question. LLMs just give you want you want. They don't tell you if what you want is right or wrong.
With humans it's very non standardised and hard to know what you'll get or it it'll work.