In this piece, I'm going to share my explorations with ChatGPT 4o and how it could act as a therapist. I will share the usefulness of the 4o model for such activities, and why I feel that AI might never replace a real therapist.
First some context on my previous experiences from therapy:
After my burnout in 2019, I started consistently going to a therapist, to discuss my mental issues, and uncovered a lot about my life. I read books on psychology, some of my favorites being Man's Search for Meaning, Courage to be Disliked and Meditations. These works shaped my perspective by teaching me about finding purpose, embracing personal freedom through self-acceptance, and practicing stoic resilience in the face of challenges I couldn't control.
In early 2025, I met an entrepreneur who had attempted to talk about his life with ChatGPT and had gotten into some deep conversations. I was intrigued by these experiments, and as someone who sees AI becoming more and more intertwined in our daily lives, wanted to go down this rabbit hole of seeing if AI could uncover things from my past that I had not explored with human therapists.
A few assumptions that I made about why AI would make a great therapist:
It's a machine that remembers everything I've said
When asking these deep probing questions, it would remember everything I'd said and could always reflect back to 100% of the history, which after dozens of sessions, would be impossible for a human therapist
I came up with a plan and started executing this plan with ChatGPT 4o in March 2025.
AI therapy experience
I started by writing a massive text document, basically a trauma dump of my life, every detail I can remember from my childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, 30s, 40s, the good and the bad. I soon had a document of over 3,000 words. I could have continued but decided to start working with it.
Next, I created a project in ChatGPT called Therapy sessions and instructed it to behave like a therapist. The instructions were:
I want you to be my personal therapist. I want you to avoid being a quick fixer of my problems but rather be the type of therapist that asks further questions and takes me to a journey of discovery. Then, I do want to you come up with conclusions of why I am the kind of person I am. I want to initially share a bunch of my history, in the attached trauma dump.txt
Then, I fed it my trauma dump document. It immediately started to suggest where we'd take the conversation.
After an hour of chatting with it, I had discovered several things:
It's quite good at asking deep diving questions.
It asks me often where I want to take the discussion.
It tries to fix me quite quickly, whereas I would like to probe my past more by sharing more.
I got a lot of value from the session. It gave me insights I hadn’t reached in previous therapy.
In the next session, I asked it to do less problem solving but rather focus on uncovering more details. This adjustment to focus more on exploration rather than solutions yielded interesting results. The AI adapted its approach, asking more open-ended questions about my experiences and emotions rather than rushing to provide coping strategies.
Limitations of using AI as a therapist
After five weeks, and several sessions with the AI, I feel that the most significant limitation of AI's adaptation of a therapist is the absence of a human therapist’s empathy, intuition, ethical accountability, the ability to read non-verbal cues, and the capacity to provide containment and safety.
Whilst I feel that most of these could be programmed into the AI, even created as instructions into the project inside ChatGPT, programming empathy is a struggle. How genuine can it really get?
But, for those without access to traditional therapy due to cost, location, or stigma, AI could serve as a useful tool. I will definitely continue experimenting with these AI therapy sessions, hoping to reach a point where I experience meaningful progress and gain fresh insights, which is ultimately what I seek from any therapeutic relationship.
Packaging the experience into an app
It's not very practical for a non-technical consumer to write a massive TXT file and then go to ChatGPT, start a project and then do a lot of prompt engineering to finally gain value from this exercise. So I've been thinking about how to package this experience into an accessible app.
UX options: text based prompting has its benefits as its easy to go back and forth at your own pace, and review past analysis. A pure voice UI is nice, especially for non-techies, since a pure voice UI feels natural for therapy conversations, it creates limitations around privacy and content consumption, making it difficult to have sessions in crowded spaces like trains, cafés, or when surrounded by family.
Perhaps there's a hybrid: guided conversation flows with clear buttons and structured user paths, combined with the depth of AI conversation. Past interactions and insights could be visualized in a tree-like interface, helping users track their progress and revisit important moments in their therapeutic journey.
As I mentioned in my previous piece, Building for Everyone: The UX Challenge of Consumer AI, this UX challenge is the main barrier preventing AI therapy services from going mainstream.
Regular folks are used to menus, buttons, or guided wizards on their computers. For mobile apps, there's even more convenience involved, with simple menu structures and guided processes. Now, compare that to writing prompts, which feels so archaic.
Creating an interface that balances the flexibility of conversational AI with the familiarity of traditional app design will be crucial for making these therapeutic tools accessible to everyone who could benefit from them.
Hi thanks for this amazing article! I have had a very similar experience and I came to a similar result that there should be an app for that kind of thing.
I started a project called https://gentle.so for this and would love to continue the discussion!
Ramin
(@RaminAzhdari on X)
This is a great read. Thank you, I’ve been thinking about doing it for a while and might just take the plunge