Therapists are not Robots
May 16, 2025
Author | Hannah Hill
This might be more of a rant than a blog post but I think it’s relevant and I’m not just doing it for me. I’m doing it for my profession and for all the amazing therapists out there—those that I know and those that I don’t—who show up each and every day to support complete strangers, get to know their most intimate and vulnerable stories, and provide unconditional positive regard.
The emergence of AI has caused an uproar in so many industries and therapy is no exception. Mind you, I use AI to help me organize my thoughts in blog posts nearly every time I write one. There are some huge benefits to using this technology to optimize, automate, and eliminate time wasters, especially for small business owners like me. But there’s an alarming trend emerging with individual care and the belief that AI can make it more efficient and provide better outcomes. Therapy happens to be one of them and it is disturbing to say the least.
I work in a field that is undervalued and disregarded constantly. A little backstory: for the first part of my adulthood, I worked in retail. I had various positions but worked mostly in customer service and management, kind of behind the scenes, and felt like I was wasting my time. A lot of that had to do with the responses I would get when I told people where I worked. It was an upscale retailer with amazing upward growth potential, great pay, and they treated their employees really well. But every time I told people where I worked, the response I received was “Oh, you work at the mall?” For some reason, that really bothered me and made me feel like my fun and challenging jobs were viewed so insignificantly. So, I decided to go back to grad school (again!) to pursue my degree in counseling. This, I thought, will be the job that people respect! Well, I was wrong. When I told people what I did as a counselor in a residential facility for women struggling with substance use disorders who were able to bring their children into the treatment center to heal and recover with them, I got the response: “Oh, so you work in a rehab? Like as a tech or something?” Another disheartening response and a good lesson that you shouldn’t make choices based on what others think of them. Because my job was so much more than “working in a rehab.” The women I worked with had been through significant trauma, lived really hard lives, addiction had permeated every ounce of their being, and I was someone who was tasked with providing them support, structure, and care. It paid next to nothing and was often a thankless job. But I saw the value in it. And there were a few clients that saw the value in me, too.
Now I’m in a field where people are saying that a robot can show up emotionally for a person better than I can. It blows my fucking mind. The stories and issues I attend to range significantly: parenting a teen and being frightened to make the wrong choice, dealing with a debilitating chronic illness that holds them back from living a meaningful existence and feeling like no one cares about them, battling cancer and going through chemo while dealing with the loss of a parent, invasive negative self-talk and desperation for a family unit that they never had as a child, despair and hopelessness because they are dealing with infertility and their only dream has been to become a parent, and a person newly in recovery who is navigating all of the overwhelming emotions they experience now that alcohol is not numbing their pain away. Very different people with very different situations, all of which are fucking hard to experience. I sit with that. I listen to that. I respond, I encourage, I validate…imagine your most precious loved one going through any one of those experiences. Would you tell them to go talk to AI for support? Absolutely not. But that’s what the world is telling us to do with our feelings. Talk to a robot. That robot is more equipped for this work than you, and it’s cheaper, easily accessible, and always available. Well, folks, that’s not the point of therapy. And I would venture a guess that having another human listen and empathize is much more powerful than typing into a platform that responds with typed words or an automated voice.
I recently had a client in session tell me that they used AI to support them through a loss. I sat there, dumbfounded. I couldn’t respond. It paralyzed me. After I had time to process, it made me angry. It felt like another example of my work being devalued and this time by someone who I felt benefitted from my services. I think about my own therapy experience. I’ve been working with the same therapist for many years and if she ever retires, she better make space for me once a month in her retirement plan because I’m showing up on her fucking doorstep. The things that have been so impactful in my experience with her is not the advice or suggestions she gave me, it’s the small observations she shares with me that make me feel seen and heard. One time I was describing a pretty intense internal conflict and she quietly said with a sigh “you’re so hard on yourself.” I burst into tears. People have said that to me all of my life but I disregarded it because I felt like they were just saying what they were supposed to say. This person doesn’t have to say anything. But she did because she saw it and meant it. It epitomizes the value of therapy that you can’t get from artificial intelligence.
Take for an example a recent conversation I had with an old acquaintance at a friend’s party. This person asked me what I was doing and I explained my practice and the work I do with clients. When he asked about insurances I accepted and I said that I didn’t, I charge clients by the session because insurance companies are the fucking worst and pay us shit, he basically laughed and devalued my work. I get this all the time. “I would NEVER pay that much for therapy.” Tell me you don’t value my time and work without telling me you don’t value my time and work. It’s disheartening for the therapists who have spent years in school, are drowning in student loan debt, and just want to be able to help people without burning out. I often challenge people when they say some dumb shit like that to reflect on this: sit with someone who you don’t know, have no personal interest in anything they are talking about, and listen intently, engaged and do not impart your own thoughts or opinions for 50 minutes. Now do that 6 times a day. 5 days in a row. Then tell me that my time is not valuable and not worth what I charge. Can’t do it? Yup, because that shit is hard. And that’s why me and my colleagues request that people pay what they pay for our time. Because it’s hard work and we know that it’s valuable to the people we serve. Don’t want to pay for that skill level and expertise? Then chat away with a bot who will tell you exactly what you want to hear.
So to all my colleagues and friends out there who are disheartened: by the lack of referrals, by big box therapy companies infringing on your ability to provide for your families, by people telling you that AI can do your job better than you, by people devaluing the work you do and scoffing at your hourly rate, by feeling like you can’t get ahead…I see you. I hear you. I am you. Don’t let the noise drown you out. I am grateful for you as friends, as colleagues, as mentors, and as the people I trust to treat the humans most precious to all of us. And if this post isn’t the most eloquent, it’s because I didn’t use a damn robot to help me write it.