ArticleFrontiers in psychiatry2023
Waiting for a digital therapist: three challenges on the path to psychotherapy delivered by artificial intelligence.
Article in Frontiers in psychiatry, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 76 citations in OpenAlex.
- Responsible artificial intelligence integration framework for psychiatric guidelines.The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Guideline
- Art psychotherapy meets creative AI: an integrative review positioning the role of creative AI in art therapy process.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Are You Qualified, ChatGPT? Examining Clinical Skills and Competencies of ChatGPT in Delivering Systemic Interventions.Journal of marital and family therapy · 2026Article
- Current Landscape of Mental Health Conversational Agents From a Trauma-Informed Care Lens: Scoping Review.JMIR mental health · 2026Article
- The paradox of agency in psychotherapy: How people with mental distress experience support from generative AI chatbots and human therapists.BMC psychiatry · 2025Article
- A Rule-Based Conversational Agent for Mental Health and Well-Being in Young People: Formative Case Series During the Rise of Generative AI.JMIR formative research · 2025Article
- A Prompt Engineering Framework for Large Language Model-Based Mental Health Chatbots: Conceptual Framework.JMIR mental health · 2025Article
- Virtual Reality in Psychotherapy: A Commentary on Strategies, Interventions, and Perspectives From Five Clinical Reports.Journal of clinical psychology · 2025Article
- AI as the Therapist: Student Insights on the Challenges of Using Generative AI for School Mental Health Frameworks.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Techno-emotional projection in human-GenAI relationships: a psychological and ethical conceptual perspective.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- Artificial intelligence and psychoanalysis: is it time for psychoanalyst.AI?Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- An Ethical Perspective on the Democratization of Mental Health With Generative AI.JMIR mental health · 2024Article
- The Artificial Third: A Broad View of the Effects of Introducing Generative Artificial Intelligence on Psychotherapy.JMIR mental health · 2024Article
- Assessing the Alignment of Large Language Models With Human Values for Mental Health Integration: Cross-Sectional Study Using Schwartz's Theory of Basic Values.JMIR mental health · 2024Article
- Potential use of large language models for mitigating students' problematic social media use: ChatGPT as an example.World journal of psychiatry · 2024Article
- Psychological interventions for depression in children and adolescents: A bibliometric analysis.World journal of psychiatry · 2024Article
- Artificial intelligence and social intelligence: preliminary comparison study between AI models and psychologists.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Transference and the psychological interplay in AI-enhanced mental healthcare.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- War, emotions, mental health, and artificial intelligence.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Hypnosis in psychotherapy, psychosomatics and medicine. A brief overview.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Growing demand for broadly accessible mental health care, together with the rapid development of new technologies, trigger discussions about the feasibility of psychotherapeutic interventions based on interactions with Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CAI). Many authors argue that while currently available CAI can be a useful supplement for human-delivered psychotherapy, it is not yet capable of delivering fully fledged psychotherapy on its own. The goal of this paper is to investigate what are the most important obstacles on our way to developing CAI systems capable of delivering psychotherapy in the future. To this end, we formulate and discuss three challenges central to this quest. Firstly, we might not be able to develop effective AI-based psychotherapy unless we deepen our understanding of what makes human-delivered psychotherapy effective. Secondly, assuming that it requires building a therapeutic relationship, it is not clear whether psychotherapy can be delivered by non-human agents. Thirdly, conducting psychotherapy might be a problem too complicated for narrow AI, i.e., AI proficient in dealing with only relatively simple and well-delineated tasks. If this is the case, we should not expect CAI to be capable of delivering fully-fledged psychotherapy until the so-called "general" or "human-like" AI is developed. While we believe that all these challenges can ultimately be overcome, we think that being mindful of them is crucial to ensure well-balanced and steady progress on our path to AI-based psychotherapy.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.