this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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A profound relational revolution is underway, not orchestrated by tech developers but driven by users themselves. Many of the 400 million weekly users of ChatGPT are seeking more than just assistance with emails or information on food safety; they are looking for emotional support.

“Therapy and companionship” have emerged as two of the most frequent applications for generative AI globally, according to the Harvard Business Review. This trend marks a significant, unplanned pivot in how people interact with technology.

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[–] minorkeys@lemmy.world 31 points 3 days ago (3 children)

So somewhere they feel safe to do so. Says something pretty fucked up about our culture that men don't feel safe to open up anywhere. And no, it's not their own fault.

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[–] Rooty@lemmy.world 43 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

I see a lot of people in this thread reacting with open hostility and derailment every time men's issues are mentioned. Have you tried not being a part of the problem?

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 16 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Allowing men’s issues to even be addressed risks giving legitimacy to the fact that these issues even exist. And if they exist, men can no longer be that evil monolith that exists only to be torn down and used as the cause for whatever is wrong with the world.

After all, the zero-sum game must be properly reinforced with an appropriate evil that cannot be allowed to have any weaknesses or redeeming attributes.

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[–] RedFrank24@lemmy.world 73 points 4 days ago (11 children)

I can kinda understand the appeal. An AI isn't gonna judge you, an AI isn't gonna leave a mean comment or tell you to get over it and man up. It's giving an unnerving amount of personal information to corporations, but I can sympathise with the thoughts these men are having.

[–] TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 24 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

AI might also be giving them better advice than anyone else in their life.

Growing up I certainly had no role models in my entire community. I never found anyone who was remotely helpful until I went to an expensive college that had lots of resources and they were freely accessible to me. Mental, physical, and academic.

A lot of people fail to realize these resources simple do not exist in large swaths of the country/economic bracket. They are mostly concentrated in wealthy and educated areas and given to wealth educated people who live there. If a farmer in Nebraska needs therapy, they will have to drive to multiple hours to Omaha or another urban area to have a decent shot at getting any assistance. Not everyone lives in a major coastal city that have the bulk of these resources.

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[–] vivalapivo@lemmy.today 44 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Like... yeah?

Tried to open to a girlfriend about a sensitive topic - she got the ick.

Tried to make an appointment with a psychiatrist - got a very hateful rejection because of my place of birth.

Damn, even when I try to uplift a friend, I use phrases like 'you got this before, you'll get it now'.

I don't know how to be a man, mentally

[–] BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world 19 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Getting rejection because of place of birth is worth getting that doctors license revoked, find out which body governs doctors in your location and file a complaint

[–] vivalapivo@lemmy.today 15 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Haha, not every place is in the US. Hopefully, I won't face this kind of treatment as I do not live in that shit hole of a country

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[–] card797@champserver.net 64 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Naturally. We were beaten up and ostracized if we showed weakness when we were kids. You CAN'T be sharing your feelings like that to another human.

[–] TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 40 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (53 children)

a lot of therapists and psychs are also useless for helping men. because they are women and they are basically only trained to deal with women's issues and only see women's emotional processes and processing as 'valid'. there is this default bias that men's emotional processing is 'flawed'.

imo with mental health professionals all my 'issues' were blow way out of proportion. i only had one therapist who actaully helped me was a man and that person helped me understand that 'not everything is your fault'. when all the other therapists/friends/family always 100% told me everything that happens to me is entirely my fault. they also told me it was normal/healthy to vent my feelings by doing productive things (like writing, exercising, relaxing), rather than viewing that as 'not addressing the problem'.

the issue with so much of this crap is that not only does nobody want to talk to men, it's that they don't want to listen and/or the tell us we are 'talking wrong'. even when we do talk to people, there is only a tiny window of acceptable things we an talk about and way we can talk about them or how selfish it is of him to vent/indulge his legitimate emotions.

a woman can burst into tears over any little thing and everyone wants to help her. a man bursts into tears over his father dying of cancer and all the sudden everyone wants to tell him his reaction is too intense and he should be thinking of how he is making other people feel.

Pretty much every guy has had someone in his life try to get him to 'open up' and then we he does he's met with nothing but hostility, disappointment, and eventually rejection. We are told to shut up and never talk about it again. Never, ever is he met with acceptance or love.

[–] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 39 points 4 days ago (9 children)

Therapy is just littered with bad therapists, that do more harm than good and give the practice a bad name.

For every 1 good therapist, there are probably 10+ bad ones.

It can be a fucking ordeal to navigate, financially and emotionally, to try and find the one good one.

My worst experience was a therapist which charged me 300 dollars a session to do nothing but talk about how amazing they were, and that I need to just suck it up and be amazing like they are, afterall, it was so easy for them.

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[–] Flickerby@lemmy.zip 77 points 4 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (13 children)

Alternate title "Men so starved of sources of support they resort to talking to AI"

Edit: have started a new com for men to talk to each other instead of AI !Reprieve@lemmy.zip

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[–] SuiXi3D@fedia.io 149 points 4 days ago (21 children)

Almost like questioning an AI is free while a therapist costs a LOT of money.

[–] turtlesareneat@discuss.online 63 points 4 days ago (2 children)

There are other causes here.

They've been talking for a while about how the low participation in dating by Gen Z women is because they're tired of being the entire support system for men experiencing a loneliness epidemic.

It's a lot of pressure for the women to be under, and so they're withdrawing.

I'm guessing this is one of the driving forces as well. Lack of real, emotionally intimate human connections around them. Many men are quite fucked in that regard right now.

[–] TheBat@lemmy.world 31 points 4 days ago (4 children)

because they're tired of being the entire support system for men experiencing a loneliness epidemic.

I've got no horse in this race but it appears that 'men should not be afraid to open up' articles and tweets were followed by 'men, we are not your therapist'.

🤷‍♂️

[–] triptrapper@lemmy.world 28 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I'm a therapist who works almost exclusively with men. Here one pattern I've seen often:

  • Man is conditioned from a young age not to identify, process or express his feelings
  • Man doesn't share his feelings with anyone - friends, family, partners - for years
  • Man sees woman as safe, caring and validating
  • Man confides in woman only and continues not sharing feelings with others
  • Woman becomes overwhelmed, resentful, dismissive
  • Man gets the message that he never should have opened up in the first place

It can be true both that men need to open up more and should not treat their partners as therapists. We all need support systems because no one person can always be available to give us everything we need. It's not wrong to confide in a partner, but if that partner is the only confidant it's precarious for both. And I want to emphasize this is not the fault of a man, or men as a community. This is the result of generations of conditioning from both men and women, and both men and women play a part in the solution. I also want to recognize that many of us don't have a network of people we could open up to even if we wanted to, and many more can't afford therapy.

If anyone reading this can afford therapy, I highly recommend it. It's a place to undo some of that conditioning, to sit with someone who's committed to listening, caring, and not judging.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 61 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (14 children)

The flip side of that is vast numbers of Gen Z Men saying many Gen Z women are basically misandrists, who asked them to stop interacting with them unprompted, no more unwanted attention... so they did that, they stopped... and now all they see is IG and TikToks of Gen Z Women complaining that no one asks them out on dates anymore, no one is 6' tall with a 6 figure income becore the age of 30, and willing to worship them as a queen.

I am not saying this is any kind of objectively accurate to whatever degree, but I am saying that this is the very common, general vibe.

So, in that situation: Why bother?

Many men can actually be fulfilled just staying actually single, as in not even dating single, snd getting their own lives, finances, health, to a better place.

Yes this does though also mean that ... because we've just got less general, face to face socialization going on that... basically a larger than otherwise number of them will basically develop harmful, reinforcing neuroses, in harmful echo chambers... but at the same time, that applies to women as well.

This is what happens when you jam a broad economic collapse up alongside a highly digital and publicized modern media landscape that is tweaked all to fuck to highlight and push the most extreme version of everything... along with extremely mixed messaging that an only digitally socialized person recieves, but all as a firehose, that is very hard to make true sense of.

So... fuck this shit I'm out... social withdrawal... basically becomes a reasonable mental health improving move, even if it does leave you kinda socially stunted as compared to pre-internet generations.

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[–] stoly@lemmy.world 27 points 3 days ago (7 children)

Part of me is ok with this in that any avenue to get mental health resources can be better than nothing. What worries me is that people will use ChatGPT for this sort of thing and these models will not be good help.

[–] MrMcGasion@lemmy.world 20 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'll admit I tried talking to a local deepseek about a minor mental health issue one night when I just didn't want to wake up/bother my friends. Broke the AI within about 6 prompts where no matter what I said it would repeat the same answer word-for-word about going for walks and eating better. Honestly, breaking the AI and laughing at it did more for my mental health than anything anyone could have said, but I'm an AI hater. I wouldn't recommend anyone in real need use AI for mental health advice.

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[–] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

CDC data from 2022 indicated that more than one in five U.S. adults under the age of 45 experienced symptoms of mental distress.

Must be the lack of personnel. Couldn't have anything to do with the global insecurity of rising inflation and low wage jobs coupled with the skyrocketing housing costs. Not to mention the whole "the earth is steadily getting hotter and extreme weather events are happening more and more frequently."

Yeah, let's invest in more AI that will fuck over the planet even more with colossal energy requirements and not even bother with making people more financially and socially secure.

[–] Flickerby@lemmy.zip 43 points 4 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (22 children)

The amount of sexism in this comment section is...unnerving. Does a community exist for male identifying people to talk and share their troubles in a non hostile space? If it doesn't I'll make one.

Edit: No idea what I'm doing but !Reprieve@lemmy.zip

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[–] Vreyan31@reddthat.com 14 points 3 days ago (4 children)

I think we may be (re)-discovering the appeal of monotheistic religions, and why they hew patriarchal.

On average, men desperately need more mental health resources. But, on average, they are not comfortable building that with other men, and it often isn't appropriate or effective to lean on their female significant other (if a straight man).

So - enter the primary description of 'God'. Can listen any time but will always forgive, is super masculine but won't emasculate you, and has never told another soul what you are thinking.

AI is always available and is unlikely to emasculate anyone, but that third item... Well, we'll see where this goes.

[–] Bravo@eviltoast.org 9 points 3 days ago

You've basically just described "confession". You go into a little box designed to make it as difficult as possible for the priest to identify you, you talk about all the ways you feel like you're a bad person, and the priest talks to you for a while about it, then gives you some actionable items to make amends and once you've done them God officially forgives you. The whole concept of confession is designed to allow people to let go of their regrets and live in the now. It's actually quite clever as a bit of societal design. If modern priests had psychotherapy degrees then everyone in the world would have access to free therapy - unfortunately they wouldn't be very useful for LGBT+ people.

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[–] whotookkarl@lemmy.world 23 points 3 days ago
[–] baatliwala@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Unironically the "Men will do X besides going to therapy" meme

[–] ronigami@lemmy.world 12 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Even therapists are suffering these days. It’s just more challenging than it’s ever been to gaslight clients into believing their concerns about the world aren’t objectively true and instead the symptom of an internal struggle.

[–] PTSDwarrior@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

Wow, I can’t say I’ve ever had therapists who gaslit me. Then again, I’ve purposefully sought out therapists who couldn’t prescribe meds.

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[–] MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip 85 points 4 days ago (8 children)

It's stupid as hell to share any personal information with a company that is interested in spying on you and feeding your data to the nearest advertiser they can find.

Like seriously -- are people using their brains or what?

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 60 points 4 days ago

Donald Trump was ELECTED TWICE. How is the stupidity of humanity not apparent.

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[–] fellowmortal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Just a note to say that the very first chat bot, Eliza, created in the 1960's was a Rogerian therapist. I'm sure I remember a quote that the author was surprised that people opened up to it. I doubt anyone working in AI or chat technology would not know about Eliza so probably not a surprise to the industry... but maybe I am that old. [edits: facts/spelling etc]

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 29 points 4 days ago (7 children)

What a clickbait. Of course people are picking feee resource with zero friction over 120$ an hour half a day event.

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