Microprocessing
Could Your Therapist Be Replaced with an App?
While the field of internet cognitive behavioral therapy holds a lot of promise, the best mental health care still requires a human touch
In Microprocessing, columnist Angela Lashbrook aims to improve your relationship with technology every week. Microprocessing goes deep on the little things that define your online life today, to give you a better tomorrow.
Every evening, I receive a text message from a robot. Its name is Woebot, and sometimes the messages are as simple and straightforward as “Hello there, my friend!” Yesterday, the text was a bit odd: “I flossed my grills today.”
The bot’s earnestness is strange and cute, but it’s not just there to entertain me with bizarre quips. Woebot’s job is to coach me through my stress and anxiety in 10-minute segments each night.
Woebot is a part of a burgeoning field of therapy called ICBT, or internet cognitive behavioral therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a decades-old, highly studied, and remarkably effective form of psychotherapy that focuses on problem-solving and emotional troubleshooting. Yet whether because of geographic distance from a therapist, financial issues, or insurance struggles…
