The Ethics of AI as Therapists – Free OT CEU Course

The landscape of healthcare has been changed forever with the introduction of AI.

Already, 1 in 3 adults are turning to chatbots to ask health related questions. For younger adults under age 30, the shift is even faster—nearly 30% now use AI specifically for mental health and emotional support.

Amid these broad changes is a specific question for us as therapists:

What happens when the chatbot starts to play the role of therapist?

This service is already being offered by tools – like Abby – “Your AI Therapist.”

This raises so many questions for us- and at the heart of the questions is a moral and ethical one of turning our trust from individual humans to LLMs. Today, we’ll walk through the broad ethical considerations with Megan Cornish, a licensed clinical social worker turned strategist who builds and scales ethical mental health brands.

We’ll discuss the ethics of this shift—and what our ethical duty is to respond, particularly in our day to day sessions with clients, who are likely beginning to use AI.

Not to be dramatic: but this is the conversation of our generation.

This course was designed to help you meet your ethics requirements for your CE.

1. You will be able to recognize how the ethical considerations of AI therapists may intersect with your own therapy sessions.

2. You will be able to identify how your own occupation-based therapy delivery may be shaped in the future by the presence of AI therapists.

• Intro

• Discussion

  1. Tell me your story of this bio line, how did you make this transition: I’m a licensed clinical social worker turned strategist who builds and scales ethical mental health brands

  2. What is your overall mood right now related to AI and therapy?

  3. Let’s begin by talking about disconnect you see between tech companies wanting to scale and the work provided by therapist.

  4. I’ve personally been concerned that AI to support therapists is a bunch of lip-service–and what people are building is aimed at replacing therapists- Is this founded?

  5. I want to linger on the ethical concerns outlined in this study. What jumped out to you in this study? Here’s the areas of ethic concerns:

     • Lack of Contextual Adaptation

     • Poor Therapeutic Collaboration

     • Deceptive Empathy

     • Unfair Discrimination

     • Lack of Safety and Crisis Management.

  6. Individual therapists commit ethical violations as well. But, how is it different when chatbots do?

  7. What is our ethical duty as individual therapists to respond to AI as chatbots?

  8. What are our options for protecting our patients and the integrity of healthcare delivery?

  9. What is your big existential dread for AI, and what is your big existential hope?

• Live Q&A

• Closing

• Ethical decision-making for AI in mental health: the Integrated Ethical Approach for Computational Psychiatry (IEACP) framework

• Generative AI Mental Health Chatbots as Therapeutic Tools: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Their Role in Reducing Mental Health Issues

• AI and Ethics in Mental Health: Personal Reflections on the Future of Psychiatry

It is the policy of OT Potential to disclose any financial and non-financial interest the provider or instructor may have in a product or service mentioned during an activity. This is to ensure that the audience is made aware of any bias of the speaker.

OT Potential pays guest speakers an honorarium for their participation, either directly or to an institution of the speaker's choosing at their request. We invite guests whose expertise often comes from practices, programs, or building products in their field. Where a speaker has a financial interest in the subject of a course, we disclose it below so you can weigh it for yourself.

OT Potential's interest in this topic: We have no financial stake in this topic.

Speaker interests: Megan Cornish runs Megan Cornish Marketing, a strategic communication and marketing consultancy serving mental health technology companies, and contracts with Allia Health as Head of Provider Growth. She has a financial interest in the mental health technology sector discussed in this course.