I had the idea because I’m a bit of a psychology nerd and, while I haven’t done a ton of therapy myself, I’ve got a lot of out reading people like Albert Ellis and Carl Rogers and using some of the techniques from modalities like CBT. I’ve also seen lots of people close to me struggling with mental health and finding and keeping a therapist seems to be a big part of that. Therapy can be great, but it seems to be hard to find someone you really connect with and limiting your interactions to a single, specific hour each week can leave you unsupported when you most need it. So the idea of a confidential and anonymous therapy-like chatbot, available any time you need it, seemed like it might have some value.
I’m just now diving into the world of therapy chatbots, but it doesn’t seem like there’s anything similar that’s as open and accessible as this. The closest I can think of is 7Cups, that’s that’s real people not AI. (Am a huge fan of 7Cups, though, and have been a listener there for years.)
Technically, it’s just a very thin wrapper on the ChatGPT API. Other than the interface, all I really supply is the prompt. The app itself runs entirely on Cloudflare Pages and the frontend is just Alpine.js and Simple.css. I’m a Rails guy, but Cloudflare Pages and Cloudflare Workers have become by go-to for rapid prototyping like this because it’s such so quick and easy.
Hope some of it you find it useful, and I’d love to know what y’all think!
i came across this post looking for an ai therapist. I'm surprised why there aren't more attempts on this. Therapists are pretty expensive and everyone is going thru some kind of mental health crisis nowadays. With all the tech layoffs happening a lot of people, like me, are looking at cost effective therapy options.
What else are you planning on doing to it to improve it?
