Fixing My Brain with Automated Therapy

Wanna hear me talk about Betterhelp, Talkspace, and the workers behind the apps? Check out that companion video, exclusively on Nebula: nebula.app/videos/jacob-geller-the-people-behind-t…

"Rather than figuring out how to make a computer therapist act most like a human, automated therapy has instead chosen the psychological approach that makes a human most resemble a computer" Holy fucking shit you're good at this.

“i also can’t help but notice how many of these apps boast productivity as one of their major sources of personal growth. it’s not a terrible goal, but productivity alone does not make you happier or healthier or more emotionally regulated. it does, however, make you a better worker.” holy shit, dude. i wanted to drop to my fucking knees at that line

“I cannot tell you to simply breathe to relax when the air you breathe maybe poison” I feel like this words perfectly describes our present and the upcoming demand for mental health care.

Hey! I'm getting my masters right now in mental health counseling and tonight I led a discussion in my practicum class about app companions for treatment. I just wanted to let you know that your video came up and really invigorated the room. Your work is doing great things, and I wanted to thank you. In some small way you have enriched the future of the counseling field.

No matter how hard I try, I will never disassociate the acronym CBT from cock and ball torture. Thanks for the CBT recommendations Jacob

The reason Chad Varah started the hotline is very interesting: "Varah began to understand the problems facing the suicidal when he was taking a funeral as an assistant curate in 1935, his first church service, for a fourteen-year-old girl who had taken her own life because she had begun to menstruate and feared that she had a sexually transmitted disease. He later said "Little girl, I didn't know you, but you have changed the rest of my life for good." He vowed at that time to encourage sex education, and to help people who were contemplating suicide and had nowhere to turn."

"Wake up to a sunrise." Bruh I don't get home until 11pm, you aren't getting me out of bed until 9 am lol CBT has always struck me as the "rise and grind" mindset of therapy.

I disengaged with CBT when I was asked to write a list of why flashing lights might be able to hurt me, and why this was probably not the case. I’m often fully rational in my panic, I’m aware that over stimulation cannot physically hurt me, but cannot control the fact that it is simply too much for me. At no point was it ever discussed that my ability to work through over stimulation might not be fully fixed by reframing or reasoning, but that it might have an underlying cause.

9:17, as someone with psychosis that includes scary paranoid delusions “everything you can imagine is real” is really not what I want to hear from a mental health app omg

I would like to personally congratulate you on looking the audience dead in the eye and saying CBT without missing a beat

Brilliant commentary on CBT and "pull yourself up by your own boot straps". I've just finished dealing with an abysmal psychiatrist who refuses to recognise trauma and a family genetic history of anxiety and depression ....going straight to the "you need to just think yourself better" talk, as if the other factors didn't exist. Self help and thought changing alone is often not enough when it comes to complex problems.

I'm legit on the verge of tears because of this video. CBT never worked for me, I felt invalidated and cast aside. When I asked, *demanded*, to be put in DBT, to be treated how I wanted to, I was ignored. I knew my thought patterns. I have lived with them all my life. I know how to redirect them, I know where they come from, and to be refused that knowledge of myself, when I was already in such a vulnerable place, hurt me further. I was near-delusional, at points, and I wonder if that refusal of my mind contributed to the degradation of my mind. When you mentioned the Petersonian ideology that CBT can easily fall into, that really clicked things into place. When I graduated from my therapy program, it was alongside somebody else. We had been taking different courses and treatments, just happened to enter the program at the same time, so he didn't know my therapist and I didn't know his. Sitting on that chair, his therapist comes up to congratulate him and give him advice to carry on, and reminds him that if he's in doubt of himself, just think back to what Jordan Peterson says. I often wonder if that therapy program did me more harm than good. It had many upsides, of course, but the things in my treatment I wanted, demanded, needed—those were things that went ignored. As an autistic person, it was just a reminder of the trauma inflicted upon me, the trauma of being forced to live in a system(s) antithetical to my very existence. CBT as an overreaching of capitalism, of something to be automated, of a set-time program to be churned through—that puts into words what I'd buried inside me.

I'm not even kidding, I had a therapy consultation booked for today, was terrified out of my mind about it, considered cancelling it because I've never been to therapy before and the thought of talking about my feelings with a stranger makes me want to shrivel up and die, and then you uploaded this video. I did the consultation. Your videos are great, keep it up!

He just speedrunned therapy glitchless 100% category. Man's a legend

CBT has been hilariously ineffective for me. I do not know why I was put into it, but I was put into it after a psychiatric stay. In my experience it felt like someone telling me all my issues are just in my head and I need to learn to get over it.

"learn to knit, crochet, and sew" Me, listening to this while sewing together a dress to go with the cardigan I crocheted: looks into the camera like I'm on the office and points out the growing number of antidepressants my physician keeps prescribing since I can't afford therapy

Hey! Fun fact, my dad is Lawrence Murphy, the first person to do online therapy, and has spent the past 20 years working on the ethics and considerations. He used to get laughed out of conventions or have people storm off during his presentations, showed em now eh

I am feeling: PRETTY GOOD about: A NEW JACOB GELLER VIDEO RELEASE, and I am feeling: HAPPY about this

I honestly have a lot of issues with CBT, mainly because of its central concept of naming most “bad” thoughts as illogical, or a cognitive distortion. But what if it’s not? Autistic people may feel anxious or paranoid about feeling like people don’t like them, because of a lifetime of evidence of that being true. CBT would say no, that’s not true, you are experiencing cognitive distortion. Except that we aren’t. People often are more hostile to us, because of our autistic traits. Same thing applies to folks with trauma. As Jacob said, it’s all about making perfect little workers, who can “contribute to society”. If someone has genuine distortions of reality, CBT can be helpful. But it is for a very specific type of mental illness, and for some types it is disastrous