The People Building AI Are Going to Therapy
The SF Standard, a local outlet in San Francisco, ran a piece on this. Therapists around the Bay Area are seeing a steady stream of people who work in AI.
What the article says: “the end of the world” becomes a session topic
One of the therapists quoted, Candice Thompson in Menlo Park, says roughly 80% of her clients work in AI. The shift wasn’t gradual either — it happened over the last three to six months.
Her line stayed with me. There was a time when someone telling you the world was ending was a clear sign of illness. Now it’s a concern worth taking seriously.
Alex Oliver-Gans, a therapist in San Francisco, puts his own number at 40%. Sixty or seventy hours a week in a place organized around preventing catastrophic outcomes will do something to you. The harder you work on the guardrails, the closer you are to seeing how easily the thing could get away from us. That’s a rough place to stand.
One more figure caught my eye. About 25% of his clients bring up conversations they’ve had with AI when they talk about their feelings. Some of the advice it gives them, he says, is “pretty dangerous.”
The thing wearing them out is AI. So is the thing they turn to for relief. It nests.
People burned out on screens start asking for therapy in person. But California is short more than 55,000 behavioral health workers, and in Santa Clara County 40% of the psychiatry posts sit empty.
Digital detox, after all
I feel it too, that sense of being swallowed by AI, by computers. I’m nowhere near the front lines of building any of it. The pull is still strong.
Long before AI got good, back in elementary school, I was taken with computers as a toy. For various reasons, I started paying attention to digital detox a few years ago.
Here are some of the things I do.
- Write in a notebook. Moving my hand gets what’s been circling in my head out into the open.
- Go see a film. Not the same as watching at home. Changing location matters, and a theater gives you the immersion.
- Do yoga. Coming back through the body rather than the head.
- Burn some aroma oil. One of the few things that reaches past sight and language. It acts fast.
- Keep a coping list. A technique from CBT: you write down in advance the things that settle you. Once you’re already struggling it’s hard to think of any, so you prepare while you’re well.
Stepping away from the digital for a while and facing real people, nature, and ordinary life. That might be the antidote that actually works.
Swallowed