Will computers replace psychologists?

In the 1960s, an MIT scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum developed a computer program designed to simulate therapy sessions humanist of Carl rogers.

This program carried out a series of open questions so that, seeing them through a screen, the patient could express her feelings as he would with a humanist therapist. The initiative was so successful that many patients found it difficult to accept the idea that they had been interacting with a computer program, and they believed that there was a real person sending them the messages.

Today, what is known as computerized therapy exploits all the possibilities of current technological development to offer something similar to what the Weizenbaum program offered. Now, will computers replace psychologists if we continue to bet on this line of action?

Computer therapy

Until now, computers have occasionally been used as a therapy channel, that is, a place where therapists and clients or patients have been found through the Internet. This possibility has almost always been seen as a limited version of face-to-face sessions, and therefore when possible it is recommended to physically attend a psychologist's consultation.

Computerized therapy makes computers stop being simply the channel and are active agents in the process of interacting with the person.

It is based on the use of computer programs that adapt to what the person does and offer coherent reactions accordingly. In a way, they are something similar to interactive self-help books, with the difference that in the latter the message is much more important (because it is the only thing that is offered) and that in computerized therapy the most important thing is the interaction in real time with the person.

As in psychotherapy, in computerized therapy the person who interacts with the patient does not speak more than the patient (something that would happen with self-help), but rather Rather, his service consists of asking the questions and the reactions that cause the other person to change in a psychological sense, for example, through cognitive restructuring of the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Its advantages

Undoubtedly, having a computer program capable of adapting to what is said can be interesting as a form of self-help: instead of self-managing text fragments from a book, we use as a service a program that allows us to express ourselves and reflect on what happens to us.

This makes, for example, that this service can be used almost always, simply by turning on a computer, and that this is a relatively cheap service if we compare it to the sessions of psychotherapy. However, these two factors do not make this option a substitute for the query. Lets see why

Why a computer cannot be a psychologist

The first thing to be clear about when understanding what computerized therapy is is that a computer program, at least with the technology from which it is you currently have, you will always have a fairly limited ability to adapt and learn from what a real person tells you through the language.

What characterizes us when we speak is that we use words and phrases very flexibly, using the same term in many possible ways and causing its meaning to change depending on the context.

The computer program behind a form of computerized therapy works through a decision tree, that is, a sequence of actions that is already programmed in advance and that at certain points it is divided into several parallel routes, as it happens in the books of "choose your own adventure".

This simple fact is what makes computerized therapy not comparable to real psychotherapy and, therefore, is closer to self-help: the computer cannot understand the full range of thoughts, feelings and actions of a person; it will only interpret them based on a very limited processing scheme. The computer will "force" the information it collects about us to fit into its predefined schemas, while that a psychotherapist does have enough sensitivity to adapt his behavior in totally originals.

This capacity, by the way, is basically not typical of therapists: it corresponds to human beings in general.

How to use the sessions with a computer?

In conclusion, computerized therapy can be an interesting option as a complement to real therapy, always taking into account that computers cannot empathize or "read between the lines" what a human being does real. That is why we can understand this service as a more developed form of self-help in which a certain margin is left to the participation of the person.

Although this option it is very cheap because a computer program can be sold many times with the minimum cost using the same intellectual property, the time and space to meet a flesh and blood psychotherapist remains important so that both the actions and the mental processes of the patient can be corresponded by a mind as complex and changing as the hers.