Technical Mental Health: How Therapy Became Automated
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
Dr Eoin Fullam looks at the success of mental health apps and chatbots through the lens of the transformation of therapy into a technology.
How is it that we now have computerised alternatives to the intimate and interpersonal therapeutic encounter? Mental health apps and therapy bots might be criticised as poor relations to the traditional therapeutic modes, providing crude forms of mental health intervention, but this begs the question: why are they becoming so popular? My contention is that it is because computerised therapy can very accurately simulate specific popular therapeutic modes - Mindfulness and CBT. The reason for this is that these forms of therapy are already technical, in that they approach the mind as akin to a machine, and so computerisation is a logical step for these therapeutic practices. I wish to explore what it means for a therapy to be transformed into a technology, and to consider the social and psychic consequences of this transformation.
Contact name: Rebekah Cupitt
Tags:
- Birkbeck Centre for Counselling
- Birkbeck Graduate Research School (BGRS)
- Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture (BIRMaC)
- Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
- Public lecture or event
- Research students
- School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
- School of Psychological Sciences
- School of Social Sciences