Chatbot Therapy

"There has never been a more urgent moment to critically examine mental health apps and the claim that AI can deliver effective therapy. This volume is an incisive analysis of the ways the very idea of mental health is modulated to make it amenable to automatised intervention and 'solution'. At a time when demand is increasing and public services continue to diminish, the book should be on the priority reading list for anyone who wants to understand the unforeseen individual and social consequences of technologised therapy."

"There is a paradox deeply embedded in the attempt to automate therapy, one that speaks to critical debates inside the discipline of psychology. The development of increasingly sophisticated versions of ‘artificial intelligence’ that are being put to work in mental health apps makes it all the more urgent that critical psychologists engage in conceptual analysis of the issues raised.

The chatbots Eoin Fullam analyses in this clear incisive book chime with the way we have come to think and speak about ourselves in a psychologised world – a world in which our very subjectivity is configured by forms of academic and professional psychology – and we are now faced with little screens that pretend to reflect back to us images of the psyche, encouraging us to find solace, even cure, for our ills in line with the protocols that define the software.

Here we have a history and detailed critical analysis of ‘mental health’ treatment, opening up the chatbot. Here the screen is treated as a little window into what ‘artificial intelligence’ amounts to when it is put to work on our subjectivity. It is clear that we can only understand what is ‘inside’ the chatbot by also looking at the context in which it operates, what is ‘outside’ the chatbot, outside us. The perspective the book offers is both inside and outside the chatbot world, ‘outwith’ it, enabling us to appreciate how it works while taking a critical distance from it."