James' World 2

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I’m a psychologist, and AI is coming for my job. The signs are everywhere: a client showing me how ChatGPT helped her better understand her relationship with her parents; a friend ditching her in-person therapist to process anxiety with Claude; a startup raising $40 million to build a super-charged-AI-therapist. The other day on TikTok, I came across an influencer sharing how she doesn’t need friends; she can just vent to God and ChatGPT. The post went viral, and thousands commented, including:

“ChatGPT talked me out of self-sabotaging.”

“It knows me better than any human walking this earth.”

“No fr! After my grandma died, I told chat gpt to tell me something motivational… and it had me crying from the response.”

I’d be lying if I said that this didn’t make me terrified. I love my work—and I don’t want to be replaced. And while AI might help make therapy more readily available for all, beneath my personal fears, lies an even more unsettling thought: whether solving therapy’s accessibility crisis might inadvertently spark a crisis of human connection.

Therapy is a field ripe for disruption. Bad therapists are, unfortunately, a common phenomenon, while good therapists are hard to find. When you do manage to find a good therapist, they often don’t take insurance and almost always charge a sizable fee that, over time, can really add up. AI therapy could fill an immense gap. In the U.S. alone, more than half of adults with mental health issues do not receive the treatment they need. With the help of AI, any person could access a highly skilled therapist, tailored to their unique needs, at any time. It would be revolutionary.

But great technological innovations always come with tradeoffs, and the shift to AI therapy has deeper implications than 1 million mental health professionals potentially losing their jobs.  AI therapists, when normalized, have the potential to reshape how we understand intimacy, vulnerability, and what it means to connect.

Throughout most of human history, emotional healing wasn’t something you did alone with a therapist in an office. Instead, for the average person facing loss, disappointment, or interpersonal struggles, healing was embedded in communal and spiritual frameworks. Religious figures and shamans played central roles—offering rituals, medicines, and moral guidance. In the 17th century, Quakers developed a notable practice called “clearness committees,” where community members would gather to help an individual find answers to personal questions through careful listening and honest inquiry. These communal approaches to healing came with many advantages, as they provided people with social bonds and shared meaning. But they also had a dark side: emotional struggles could be viewed as moral failings, sins, or even signs of demonic influence, sometimes leading to stigmatization and cruel treatment.

The birth of modern psychology in the West during the late 19th century marked a profound shift. When Sigmund Freud began treating patients in his Vienna office, he wasn’t merely pioneering psychoanalysis—he was transforming how people dealt with life’s everyday challenges. As sociologist Eva Illouz notes in her book, Saving the Modern Soul, Freud gave “the ordinary self a new glamour, as if it were waiting to be discovered and fashioned.” By convincing people that common struggles—from sadness to heartbreak to family conflict —required professional exploration, Freud helped move emotional healing from the communal sphere into the privacy of the therapist’s office.

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Sean Gladwell—Getty Images

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