I've belatedly started watching the classic late-90s, early-2000s series, The Sopranos. If you haven't seen it, or if it's been while, the series starts with mafia boss, Tony Soprano, visiting a psychiatrist after suffering a panic attack. Not exactly how you might picture a mafia man, is it? But Tony is just as human as anyone else and his line of work is certainly stressful...

Can you imagine a 2022 reboot in which Tony Soprano's psychiatrist is replaced by a robot or an app? It seems somehow more absurd to me than a mobster seeing a psychiatrist in the first place, but then, there really are people who are turning to tech for their mental health needs. And more of them than you might think.

One of the latest iterations of artificial intelligence (AI) is the robot therapist. It should come as little surprise that during a time of perpetual crisis, people are beginning to find alternatives to traditional (often expensive) therapy. Especially when you consider the pervasiveness of the Internet of Things. When so many people already wear smart watches and other tracking devices, why not turn to AI and machine learning for the problems many would rather not discuss with other people?

Welcome to the future! We still have the same problems we've always had – depression, anxiety, and any other number of mental health issues – but we have new tools to deal with them now.

A 2020 study by Fast Company, Workplace Intelligence, and Oracle found that the majority of their 12,000 respondents (82%) were turning to tech instead of humans to support their mental health issues. The study also noted that:

Some of the most common repercussions of declining mental health included sleep deprivation, poor physical health, reduced happiness at home, suffering family relationships, and isolation from friends.

What's most interesting to me is that so many respondents said they felt more comfortable talking to a robot than to a human being about their mental health. Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but I've always preferred talking to a real person than to a bot. However, this preference for robot therapists may have something to do with the stigma that mental health issues still carry, even in a time in which we are talking about mental health more – or at least more openly – than we ever have before.

Indeed, the study found that one reason many respondents find robot therapists more appealing is the idea of a "judgment-free zone" – 34 % of respondents cited this as a reason to choose AI over human support.

What – or who – are these robots providing people with psychological advice? Let's look at three examples.

Meet Woebot, an app that offers emotional support in the form of mindfulness exercises and cognitive behavioral therapy's mood regulation strategies to improve users' mental health. Woebot uses short conversations to gauge users' mood patterns and recommends more intensive care when it detects a need for it. The app prides itself on offering service that is immediate, personal, accepting, and actionable.

Another example of a robotic therapist is BioBeat, a wearable piece of tech, similar to a FitBit, which tracks physical health data such as your heart rate, sleep patterns, and activity levels to determine your state of mental health. BioBeat will then recommend "biofeedback therapy" such as meditation or deep breathing exercises. As BioBeat's website says:

"Biobeat’s solution uses health-AI and ML on big-data in order to provide actionable insights on patient care. More than just analyzing the data, Biobeat also generate it, using our proprietary sensor for continuous monitoring of vital signs unique to Biobeat."

In Sweden, there's a free, government-approved chatbot therapist called Flow that can be used by people who are waiting to see human therapists but are dealing with mental health issues that can't wait. Flow serves as a kind of bridging service. This chatbot engages users with daily conversations and offers self-help techniques, mood tracking, curated videos, mental exercises, and meditation.

I noted earlier that we have the same mental health issues we've always had, but what's changed is the solution. This is true, but it's only a half-truth. The mental health crisis brought about by the pandemic is a unique one in the sense that it triggered a long-neglected terrain of mental health, what organizational psychologist and motivational expert Adam Grant calls "languishing." In a New York Times article, Grant wrote:

"Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work."

The feeling of "languishing" isn't the same as burnout, possibly the most overused mental health catchphrase in recent times. While burnout implies a lack of energy, languishing isn't a case of having no energy but of aimlessness. As Grant says:

"Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021."

While we are now in 2022 and we hope that means a somewhat fresh start and an improvement in the COVID situation, if nothing else, the mental health issues that arose during the pandemic are not likely to just disappear. Not to mention that COVID is far from the only crisis facing the world today.

Corey Keyes, the sociologist who coined the term "languishing" found that those who are most likely to experience major depression and anxiety disorders in the next 10 years aren't those who have symptoms of these disorders now, but those who are currently languishing. And part of the problem with this middle child of mental health is that people who are languishing might not notice "the dulling of delight or the dwindling of drive" for some time. They may well be indifferent to their own indifference – which means that they are unlikely to reach out for help.

Grant suggests that the antidote to languishing, or its more mundane expression "meh", is "flow" – the art of immersing yourself in a particular activity. However, the difficulty with achieving flow is that you need to be able to pay attention to just one thing for a prolonged period of time.

If you, like me, are a little skeptical about robot therapists, it may be worth considering the ways in which tech can help us to achieve a sense of flow, the antithesis of languishing. According to Oracle's study, the top benefits attributed to working with AI for mental health were:

While not the same as the so-called "talking cure," AI can provide people with actionable data to improve their efficiency and remove distractions. Many tech platforms can automate previously time-consuming and draining tasks, enabling people to focus on their most important tasks. Productivity and time-tracking apps can help people set their priorities and manage to focus on one task at a time.

While AI therapists are becoming more commonplace, there remains a kind of intermediary, a platform like BetterHelp, which partners with human therapists to offer a similar experience to that of Woebot when it comes to instant messaging and virtual therapy.

And whether tech is helping with the actual therapy aspect of combatting mental health issues or in less direct ways, such as by automating tasks at work that were contributing to stress levels, there's no denying that technology can help us find ways to deal with a sense of languishing or any other pervasive mental health issues.

However, for me, the question still remains: will robots replace the human touch in therapy or elsewhere? Just how reliant upon robots will we become and what will that mean for the future of psychology or any other number of careers or jobs?