ChatGPT as a Therapist Assistant: A Suitability Study
This addresses the problem of enhancing therapy efficiency and support for patients and therapists, though it is incremental as it adapts existing AI to a new application.
The study explored using ChatGPT as an assistant in psychotherapy to collect patient information, provide companionship, and organize data, finding it can engage in positive conversations and offer coping strategies without medical advice, but identified technical and human-centric challenges.
This paper proposes using ChatGPT, an innovative technology with various applications, as an assistant for psychotherapy. ChatGPT can serve as a patient information collector, a companion for patients in between therapy sessions, and an organizer of gathered information for therapists to facilitate treatment processes. The research identifies five research questions and discovers useful prompts for fine-tuning the assistant, which shows that ChatGPT can participate in positive conversations, listen attentively, offer validation and potential coping strategies without providing explicit medical advice, and help therapists discover new insights from multiple conversations with the same patient. Using ChatGPT as an assistant for psychotherapy poses several challenges that need to be addressed, including technical as well as human-centric challenges which are discussed.