Determining the Effectiveness of ChatGPT as a Tool for Therapy Based on Students’ Perspectives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.58445/rars.1375Keywords:
ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence, Mental Health, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Counseling, Technology, StudentAbstract
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 4 in 10 American high school students feel “persistently sad or hopeless,” and as per the World Health Organization, the number of mental health care workers globally are 1 for every 100,000 people. The lack of sufficient mental health care workers prompted this study, which aims to determine to what extent are a New Jersey High School’s students (ages 13-18) willing to consider ChatGPT-4 as a source of counseling in comparison to human counselors based on participants’ comfort level with AI therapy, and based on their ratings of ChatGPT’s and the counselor’s responses to student based counseling questions. The main hypothesis was that ChatGPT-4 has the potential to serve as a mental health counseling tool. Through the implementation of the chosen methodology, it was found that the focus group rated the mental health responses of
ChatGPT higher than the LCSW for the majority of the questions. It was also found that the focus group displayed a moderate level of comfort with the concept of ChatGPT driven counseling. These results indicate that there is a significant population of students at the New Jersey High School who are open to receiving guidance from ChatGPT. One implication of this finding is that, with further research and improvements made to ChatGPT, this application of
ChatGPT could be used to address the aforementioned issues in the mental health field.
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