There's evidence that a lot of suicide hotlines can be just as bad. You hear awful stories all the time of overwhelmed or fed up operators taking it out on the caller. There's some real evil people out there. And not everyone has access to a dedicated therapist who wants to help.

Over the long term I have significant hopes for AI talk therapy, at least for some uses. Two opportunities stand out that might have potential:

1. In some cases I think people will talk to a soulless robot more freely than to a human professional.

2. Machine learning systems are good at pattern recognition and this is one component of diagnosis. This meta analysis found that LLM models performed about as accurately as physicians, with the exception of expert-level specialists. In time I think it’s undeniable that there is potential here.

Suicide is big business. There's infrastructure readily available to reap financial rewards from the activity, atleast in the US.

More so from corporate proprietary ones no? At least I hope that's the only cases. The open source ones suggest really useful ways proprietary do not. Now I dont rely on open source AI but they are definitely better

Real therapy isn’t always better. At least there you can get drugs. But neither are a guarantee to make life better—and for a lot of them, life isn’t going to get better anyway.