Do we need human therapists anymore?

It's a question I've found myself returning to over the past year, and one that has left me feeling curious, unsettled, hopeful, defensive, angry, and fascinated at various times. Before we can ask what the future of therapy looks like, we need to ask what therapy was intended to do in the first place.

If technology can increasingly provide information, reflection, emotional validation, pattern recognition, and even something resembling therapeutic conversations, what exactly is the human therapist still for?

Therapy used to conjure a fairly specific image: two people sitting in a room (or one lying on a couch), having a conversation about what was distressing the client. When I picture therapy now, I no longer see the same room. I picture video calls, mental health apps, AI chatbots, asynchronous conversations, and digital tools that have dramatically expanded access to psychological support. Technology has made information easier to access than ever before. Whether it has made it easier to engage with our deepest emotional wounds is a different question altogether. That shift has changed what many people expect therapy to offer.

Not very long ago, therapists were among the few people we could turn to for psychological knowledge. They helped us understand emotional regulation, conflict, attachment, relational patterns and mental health conditions. In today’s world, you can ask these questions to your friendly, always-available chatbot instead. I don’t believe this is necessarily a bad thing. The democratisation of information removes barriers of access. I’m aware that therapy is often expensive and unaffordable to many, and AI, in all its flaws, has still helped bridge this gap in access to psychological knowledge.

I don't think technology is destroying therapy. If anything, this moment is exposing something we may have forgotten: therapy was never the only way people could receive psychological support. New technologies have simply expanded how support can be offered. You can reach out to ChatGPT to give you a technique, a tool, a reflective question, and perhaps an analysis of your situation. I’m not anti-tech by any means. The point of therapy was never limited to psychoeducation and insight. Knowing that you have an anxious attachment style isn't the same as tolerating the anxiety that shows up during an argument. Knowing your cognitive distortions doesn't automatically help you respond differently when you're emotionally overwhelmed. Knowing the right answer intellectually doesn't necessarily make it emotionally possible to live a different life. 

Therapy often acts as a bridge between information, insight, integration and change.

So where exactly does a therapist contribute in this process?

Therapy has historically been misunderstood as "just listening", a misconception that mirrors the way emotional labour itself has often been undervalued. That dismissal says as much about our culture as it does about therapy.

A therapist notices things that you may not fully understand about yourself. This noticing comes in the form of bringing into conversation the moments where you stutter, the subtle changes in your facial expressions that tell us you’re going through different emotions; the contradictions between what you think, do, and what you believe in. The role of the therapist is really in how they hold the complexities of being human without trying to immediately resolve them. I know that we live in the dopamine-filled attention economy where it feels tempting to get to the right answers as soon as possible. Therapy quietly resists the logic of the attention economy. It asks you to slow down, stay with your feelings, and fully inhabit an experience instead of rushing to resolve it. Sometimes it questions the very need to find an answer at all. Sometimes it changes the questions you're asking.

This is where I think AI still falls short. I’m not saying it can't generate thoughtful responses, but I do believe that it cannot truly participate in a relationship. I don’t see ChatGPT and Claude take pauses to stay with your feelings or challenge or interrupt your patterns in ways that allow you to feel uncomfortable. I don't think they can genuinely stay in a difficult moment with a person in the way another human can. And that, I think, is where my argument against AI as an alternative to a therapist begins: meaningful psychological growth often requires us to stay with discomfort. Yes, you can always give these chatbots explicit instructions on “challenge me, refute me where necessary, point out my blind spots,” and yet, it may still fall short in one key aspect of therapy - the ability to embody presence and understanding by a person who has their own inner world, perspectives, beliefs, individuality, and history. That brings me to another question:

Can the therapeutic relationship be coded into an LLM?

A therapist could make incorrect assumptions, say the wrong things occasionally, misunderstand you, burn out, or fail to recognise their own biases. Human therapists are not automatically better simply by virtue of being human.

And yet, paradoxically, those imperfections can become psychologically meaningful precisely because another person with their own mind, boundaries, and subjectivity is sitting across from you.

AI, on the other hand, can respond immediately. It remembers conversational context, generates reflections, identifies recurring themes, simulates different perspectives, and is available whenever you need it.

What is it then, about being genuinely known by another human being that is psychologically different from receiving a supposedly excellent response?

I don’t wish to devalue or downplay the meaningfulness of relationships with LLMs. I’ve had people come to therapy sessions saying, “Chat understands me so much better than most people do in my life.” It’s a very real experience that should not be discounted, overlooked, or diminished. And yet, it still leaves me wondering why people continue to show up in therapy when those conversations are already available elsewhere. The conclusion I've slowly arrived at is this:

The psychological conditions created within a therapeutic relationship are fundamentally different from those created with a chatbot. That difference goes beyond the quality of the responses being generated. It's about what becomes possible when another person, with their own history, emotions, limitations, and subjectivity, joins you in making sense of your own.

A therapist isn't simply observing or responding to you from the outside. They are participating in a relationship that is unfolding in real time. They hesitate, misunderstand, repair, notice things they hadn't noticed before, and are themselves affected by what happens between the two of you. The therapeutic relationship is co-created. That's fundamentally different from interacting with a system that generates responses, no matter how sophisticated those responses become. Therapy offers something that is mutually lived, rather than simply experienced by one person and responded to by another.

What does the future of psychotherapy look like?

You and I can't accurately predict what therapy will look like ten or twenty years from now. As technology continues to reshape how we learn, communicate, and relate to one another, therapy will almost certainly evolve alongside it. If AI increasingly becomes capable of providing psychoeducation, reflective questions, emotional validation, and basic psychological support, perhaps therapists will spend less time teaching skills and more time helping people integrate them into their lives.

I imagine a future where a therapist's role actually deepens as AI becomes an assistant rather than a replacement. It could help manage administrative tasks, organise information, and perhaps synthesise patterns across different aspects of a person's life. With a client's consent, information from allied areas such as physical healthcare, sleep, nutrition and movement could give therapists a fuller picture of the contexts in which psychological distress is unfolding. This wouldn't make a client's history or the story they bring into therapy any less important. It could simply give both the therapist and client more context about where to begin.

More information does not necessarily mean quicker results. The future of therapy may have more to do with being a companion in making meaning. Less theory, more presence. Less information, more intention. Less worksheets, more pauses. Less obvious answers, and more interesting questions.

Therapists will disappoint you sometimes. They may misunderstand you or leave you feeling more unsettled than when you arrived. Those moments aren't necessarily signs that therapy has failed. Sometimes they are the very experiences that expand our capacity to hold two seemingly contradictory truths at once:

I can feel deeply understood and disappointed at the same time.

I can feel known and uncomfortable in the process of being known.

Perhaps that's where the therapeutic relationship continues to offer something distinct. Therapists may not always understand us perfectly. And yet, there may be value in having another person willing to remain in uncertainty with us rather than rushing to resolve it.

This leaves me with one final question: Does therapeutic value arise from the presence of another consciousness, or does it lie in the experience of being understood?

I don't know the answer.

What I do know is that we probably don't need therapists to remain the gatekeepers of psychological knowledge. We don't need them to have all the answers, and we certainly don't need therapy to be the only meaningful way people come to understand themselves. Perhaps its value lies somewhere else: in having another person sit beside you while you slowly discover which questions are truly yours to ask.

As technology becomes increasingly capable of talking to us, understanding us, and helping us make sense of ourselves, I suspect that's the part of therapy we'll need to understand much more deeply.

Perhaps we don't need therapists to do everything we once expected them to do. We simply need to become much clearer about what only a therapeutic relationship can offer.