The Therapists Using AI to Make Therapy Better

By Charlotte Jee & Will Douglas Heaven

“Researchers are learning more about how therapy works by examining the language therapists use with clients. It could lead to more people getting better, and staying better.

Researchers have tried to study talking therapy for years to unlock the secrets of why some therapists get better results than others. It can be as much art as science, based on the experience and gut instinct of qualified therapists. It’s been virtually impossible to fully quantify what works and why—until now. Zac Imel, who is a psychotherapy researcher at the University of Utah, remembers trying to analyze transcripts from therapy sessions by hand. ‘It takes forever, and the sample sizes are embarrassing,” he says. “And so we didn’t learn very much even over the decades we’ve been doing it.’

AI is changing that equation. The type of machine learning that carries out automatic translation can quickly analyze vast amounts of language. That gives researchers access to an endless, untapped source of data: the language therapists use. “

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