Hello and thank you so much for joining Palo Alto University and the Division of Continuing and Professional Studies for our podcast episode regarding the future of mental health and the role of telemental health. My name is Chloe Corcoran, and I'm the Director of Alumni Relations for Palo Alto University. I am incredibly fortunate to be joined by our experts today, Dr. Eduardo Bunge and Dr. Donna Sheperis. Thank you so much for being here for this important conversation. They waved in case you're listening on audio so you know that they're there. So I think it's I think it's important to lay out the context for our discussion. So you know a little bit about the experience of our experts here. Dr. Donna S. Sheperis is a professor in the counseling department and director of the e-clinic here at Palo Alto University, a licensed professional counselor and board certified telemental health provider. Donna has been a practicing clinician for over 30 years with seven years exclusively in the provision of telemental health services. An ethicist by training, Donna is a former member of the ACA ethics committee and currently serves on the ACA ethical appeals panel. As director of PAUs e-clinic, she has been instrumental in bringing educational and clinical opportunities to psychologists and therapists in training at traditional telemental health as well as the use of adjunctive digital therapeutics, including an AI supported supervision platform to enhance client care. Donna's research in digital mental health led to publishing telehealth standards of care in 2020. To meet the needs of the burgeoning discipline of ethical distance practice. Dr. Eduardo Bunge is a professor in the Department of Psychology here at PAU. Dr. Bunge directs the children adolescents psychotherapy and technology research lab, CAPT, and is Associate Director for the International Institute of Internet Interventions for Health at Palo Alto University. His work is focused on integrating technology and mental health. And his most recent contributions were an artificial intelligence based chatbot for depression, anxiety, and parenting in English and Spanish. Dr. Bunge has more than 80 publications, including five clinical books, and more than 70 peer reviewed articles and chapters. Alright, so I gotta say, I'm feeling pretty confident in the expertise here. And I promise to our audience, I'm going to pipe down shortly so we can hear from the experts instead. Like all health fields, provision and work of mental health is changing, sometimes rapidly in many ways. One of the most obvious examples of this since the beginning of the pandemic has been the rise of telemental health, this points to a significant technological disruption in the care of clients. And I can only imagine that we're going to see more in the future. So considering how let's say different the past few years have been I'm going to ask you each the same question. You both have extensive experience with telemental health care, and even before it became so prevalent in the past few years, how did you get involved in this so early on? And did you foresee the impact it could have? And Dr. Sheperis, we're gonna start with you.
Thank you, Chloe, I would say I've always been a bit of an early adopter with skepticism. So I started teaching online back in 2009. Because I didn't think it was a good idea. I wanted to test the waters, so to speak, and I was wrong. And subsequently, I started seeing clients in my private practice online in 2016, with that same healthy dose of skepticism, and again, I was wrong. So I am really eager about this new opportunity. In fact, I think the infusion of tech into mental health is one of the if not the greatest movement in mental health care in history. And I'll shoot it to Eduardo to see if he agrees.
I totally agree with what you just mentioned. I also share the initial skepticism. The first time I've heard of internet interventions in those days was from Dr. Ricardo Muñoz. He was doing studies with 100,000 participants, and I told him Dr. Muñoz, you will leave us with no jobs. And he's retiring today and I will be taking his position at i4Health right so he's not taking he's not taking out our jobs. But I was really rusty with technology in general. And I thought that eh this was not for me. But I realized that technology becomes easier with time. And every time it gets better and more simple to use it even for those that don't know how to code. I don't know how to code at all right. But I see so much potential that eh I'm really glad I moved into this field.
That's fantastic. So I just learned a couple things. Just because you're skeptical about something doesn't mean you should stay away from it. Please engage, because apparently, we can be wrong. And also want to say if Dr. Muñoz is listening, happy retirement, and I'm going to move over into a question for Dr. Sheperis. Now, you're a trained ethicist and maintain a strong presence in this domain. Are there ethical considerations to providing telemental health that don't present themselves in an in person session? And are there ethical considerations that every clinician should ask themselves as they look to better respond to the mental health needs of their clients in innovative and new ways?
Yeah, absolutely. There are so many ethical considerations that we wrote a full article on them. We as a profession of helpers, psychologists, counselors, social workers, marriage and family therapists, psychiatrists, we don't have a unified standard of how we go about telemental health care. And so we worked in our clinic to pull in all the existing research and standards to generate that. But to your point, moving to telemental health is not just translating in person skills, to video, aspirational care, moving beyond what is minimally required, is so much more nuanced. We need to know that what we are doing is culturally meaningful for our clients, that we keep them and their information safe and protected in the process. And that we keep up with the almost weekly legal changes to this kind of work. For example, I can legally provide services in three states and most countries, but that can change any day. And it's my responsibility as a clinician to know about those changes. But going back to that culture of care, and how does mental health technology impact that not every person clinician or mental health challenge is appropriate for telemental health care, Dr. Bunge is working in some areas that we know it's appropriate, and we are seeing meaningful results. I am astounded daily by how effective the work is with the clients that I see, choosing those culturally informed platforms and technologies is I think, what is key to being an ethical provider. So thanks,
that's really interesting to hear it sounds I mean, there are so many considerations into providing in person care, and then the telemental health field, you talked about being culturally relevant. It's another type of culture to make sure that we are prepared for. Absolutely. So I want to move over to Dr. Bunge. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit to us about your work studying and developing AI supported digital therapeutics for various populations. Now, I'm sure these considerations that we just talked about have come up multiple times over the years. And what advice would you offer practitioners for whom this may be a new modality?
For practitioners that this may be a new modality, I would say that it's important for us not to miss the opportunity of providing more help to more people, I always share this example. So Skype videoconference platforms have been there for 20 years, we faced resistance to use these technologies for 20 years. Right. And only after the pandemic hit, we realized that we could do tele teletherapy, right. So I think that it's important that our fears do not stop us of providing more help to more people. That's that's one thing that I that I would have to say, in terms of the job that the work that I'm doing. As you mentioned in the introduction, I'm doing research on chatbots for mental health, they're also known as conversational agents. And there's something a new concept is a little bit more advanced that is digital personas that are based on the conversations that you create for a chatbot, for example, right, digital, personalized, like an avatar that you can talk to, and they will talk back to you. And so I started doing research on chatbots, probably five years ago, and the first thing that struck me was that you can have conversations that are very similar to the ones that you would have with a real therapist. I was testing one specific chatbot I tested as a real user right. And when I finished the dialogue, I said, Oh my god, this is the dialogue that I had hundreds of times with my clients. And they actually helped me, right. So I got curious about the research. And I started doing research myself, one of the things that I realized is that people are creating bonds. With the chatbots, we're used to have conversations only with humans. And suddenly, since four or five years ago, we're being able to have conversations with something that's not a human. So what happens instead, we end up attributing human characteristics to those agents to the conversational agents. And I've seen so many kind of strong comments from users, such as I like you, because you care about me, or I thank God that he put you on my way. Or you remind me of my mother that died and passed away because of cancer, or you're better than the therapist that I had, right? And I don't want to make this dichotomy therapies versus chatbots. But but those comments, were really kind of striking to me and to my research lab, right. So that's why we started doing this type of research. We've done studies, as you mentioned, with depression, anxiety, parenting for parents. Now we're doing on users with autism spectrum disorder. And we know that people can learn from the conversations that we provide them with the chat bots, we know that they find them useful in terms of efficacy in randomized control trials with good basis, we have some promising effects for depression in the short term, but not in the long term. For the anxiety its a little bit less, less clear, there are studies showing it. But usually the effects are smaller than what we see in face to face. And, and I think we still need to do a lot of research to show and to be confident about the utility of these bots, but for sure, they are helping in a small range to many individuals throughout the whole world.
So I'm hearing a couple of things here, I'm hearing the issue of access. You mentioned at the beginning of providing more services to more people in different places. I'm also hearing that this can be used as an enhancement. And there's not necessarily a dichotomy between, you know, therapy and chatbots, or therapists and chatbots. But I'm gonna be honest, I think you said some things, that are gonna scare some people. And we'll move into that, because I was gonna ask you both about the history of the evolution of telemental health, but I kind of get the feeling that our audience knows where that leads, which we just touched on, which is the use of artificial intelligence in the field. And now we're hitting an area where a lot of people may have some pre existing ideas about these technologies used in mental health. So I'm going to point out that there's a large part of the population that seems to be uncomfortable with this idea. There's some evidence of problems with this newer technology. And I'll be honest, I think there's a lot of fear around its use in this area. Because if something goes wrong, the consequences could be devastating. First, I'm going to ask you both, how would you address those fears? And Donna, we'll start with you, please.
Yeah, absolutely. I, one of the things that I try to remind people of or inform them of if they don't know, is the idea of telemental health as a discipline has been around since the early 1900s. But we'd like to think it's only been around since COVID. So this is a progressive opportunity that is only now entering into the AI space. And it is not just radically getting to AI. It's been a century in the making. And yeah, here we are. So remember how I talked about my origins in skepticism? I think being a curious skeptic is okay. So too often when we have these discussions, I see people who have feelings about the topic. I'm a therapist, I love feelings, but they don't have facts. And they come to the table with fears that aren't always substantiated, or they're substantiated with a one off thing that may have happened with AI that I could find evidence of happening in therapy offices by humans more frequently, but it's scary, right? So bring the facts and the feelings do the work. Read read everything. Choose your sources wisely. When you do play with AI. We all have the opportunity to play around with some AI heck, we've been using it in some form or fashion since we first started using Microsoft Word and the little paperclip guy would pop up and ask if we wanted help. Make it, love that guy. I love that guy. Yeah. Can I help you? That was radical. But you know what, we don't ask folks to go read hard copies of articles in a library anymore. We let them Google and get do searches and gather materials. AI has an opportunity to be that revolutionary for us to just sort of streamline our work. But it doesn't have to tell us what we think or what we feel. I also think it's important in the conversations that I have to help remind people that in terms of AI, the horses out of the barn, you know, the Senate's developed a subcommittee on AI, they may be a little behind the times to regulate something that's already being used. How do we as a profession, and as a group of humans living today, self govern and learn to use it wisely. But if we can use it to create better opportunities for mental health care, I'm all for it when we were skeptical of the internet, and now it has become commonplace. I feel like this is going to become commonplace, too. But we'll have to always be a little skeptical.
So it's sounding like you're saying that this is a more natural evolution. And just because we are, let's say I, or some people are hearing about it more prevalently now for the first time, that that means because we're hearing about it, it's already been in use for some time, is that correct?
It has been back when Eduardo and I were first looking at this heck, back when I was teaching and training in 2010. Using technology, everybody thought it was crazy. And don't do that. That's weird. And now it's just normal. Now being on a call a video call is just normal. Very few of us want to go back to our providers offices, we'd rather do a video. So the AI option is a new level of that.
I'm going to ask you, Dr. Bunge, if you could jump in as well, to help address these address these fears. I see it on your face, you've got some things to say.
I couldn't wait to to provide my insights here. So first of all, I think that the fear that we're seeing, it's normal. It's absolutely understandable, because it's something that is unknown to many people, right? We humans during the history of evolution, and the relationship between technology and humans, there was always a fear to any new technology. When the radio started when the TV when internet, as Donna was saying, right video games. And the one thing and I actually something called moral panic, right? People are start creating these fears, and they only see the facts that they contribute to those fears. Right. So I've heard that someone had a problem with ChatGPT. Yes, true, right? How many people have ChatGPT. And how many people have problems with the current technologies face to face therapy, right? Eh you were mentioning, that the problems here maybe like devastating consequences, what I would like to say is that we're already seeing devastating consequences of what we're doing. If we keep on thinking that we should provide only therapy, one on one, an hour a week, that's a model that will only reach those that have lots of wealth, right, and time and availability. And that broke the barriers of stigma. We are not providing help to more than a billion people with mental disorders in the world. So we urgently need to do something that can scale and help them all right. So that's, that's one thing that I think it is important. The other thing is, there's something that is has to do with the generations, right? There's a quote, I don't remember the author now, sorry. This is the first the technology that you see in the first 15 years of your life is natural, you don't question it? I share ChatGPT to my kids, because it's fine. Right? To me, it blows my mind. Right? But that the technology that you see in the first 15 years of your life is natural. That technology that you see in your second 15 years of lives is exciting. And you can make a living because of that technology. The technology that you see afterwards will ruin your world. Right. So there's kind of this thing that usually we question the technology that's new to us. Eh but my kid was interacting with GPT talking to GPT and GPT was talking right? It was all through audio and voice right? After half an hour of a conversation, but it was absolutely normal. And they couldn't believe what I was saying what they were seeing they say ah yeah it's fine. Right? It's natural to them. So I think that the fears have to do with us being exposed to something that's new. In therapy, we know that what relieves the fear is exposure. And I think that with time I will stop talking about the problems of GPT. And we will start talking about the problems of the new technologies that will emerge such as digital personas, right? Or something new. But I think that we have to think of how much we are missing because of the fears. And as Donna said, One things is one thing is our feelings. And the other thing is the facts. Let's see how many people can benefit, how much science could advance if we make a good use of this technology.
So you've just given me a lot to think about, because I don't want to be devastated by new technology. And I can easily see that happening. Because I can see that happening, you know, with other people in the world as well. And you touched on something, both of you mentioned this in a different way that we're selecting the evidence that we already believe in a lot of ways. So if I want to believe that this technology is not going to be helpful, or may actually be harmful, I can find confirming evidence of that. But if I take a more holistic view, I may see something very different. You also both touched on something very near to my heart, in that we're not providing we're not able to provide mental health care to everybody who needs it, which gets back to access. And I'm going to jump into that in a little bit. But Dr. Bunge, you said something, you know, we have to move, we have to move past these fears. And, and let's actually do that. So I know, this is going to happen, right? It's going to be a more prominent delivery mechanism for mental health care. So let's talk about the advantages. And let's let's Yeah, let's dive into equity and access and how AI can help address that. And I'm going to ask you one question, but I'm going to save it for after I've already said too much. So let's go with let's go back to Dr. Sheperis.
Okay. Sure. Yeah, equity issues. That is one of the reasons that I started with distance ed. And distance clinical practice is too often the person that wanted to be in the room either couldn't physically be there because of some physical barrier, or they couldn't afford the transport to get there, or they were simply too rural, I was living and training in very rural southeastern United States. So the idea that maybe I would take myself to them, in some way was very appealing to me. Intellectually, I just wasn't convinced in my heart, how that would work. The minute I opened my doors to an online practice, the people who came to see me were very different than the types of clients I was seeing in the small town where I was living and working. It allowed me to work with people from a lot of different areas, but also different walks of life, people who had very high profile positions, and weren't able to take the time off for a session, for example, people with physical challenges that either couldn't get there, or maybe they were women with young children that couldn't find daycare, or they didn't have transportation, or they were simply afraid to be seen in a therapist office, people who are in marginalized communities who didn't want to add to that stigma that they were already facing around mental health. Because of that, those are just my limited qualitative experiences that let me dig into the research around what we're doing. And what we see is that as Dr. Bunge has already mentioned, some of the earliest earliest research showed almost imperceptible to no difference between in person delivery and online delivery of depression treatment, for example. And if that's the case, then why not do it in a way that lets everybody come to the table, instead of those who have means or time or whatever the resource is that they have to do. So what I think we're dealing with is increased access, decreasing those barriers that geography creates, we're able to personalize what we do a little bit differently when we have opportunities for more cultural sensitivity rather than less. And then when we get into AI, we could even have mental health care available around the clock, so that when your mental health worries are waking you up in the middle of the night, there's no private practitioner available for you to have an hour session with. But there might be a chatbot or electronic journal or something you could interface with that would allow you to get some psycho ed, some motivation, some solace and get some sleep so that you can do work between those 50 minute live sessions, or Yeah, so I don't think we're working ourselves out of a job. I think we're creating access for people that need it and deserve it.
No, I you I just wanted to mention real quick, one thing you mentioned was not only is this bringing access to other people, but it's also opening up a clinicians worldview to different areas and cultures that a clinician may not have access to in a city or in a rural area, etc.
Absolutely. Yes, you're right.
And Dr. Bunge, I know I cut you off, I'm so sorry, please jump in.
I wanted to add to what Donna said is that em it's not only about increasing access, we need to improve the efficacy of what we're doing. Why I'm saying this, if you look at meta analysis on depression, the average rate of remission is 30%. Depression is the most common mental disorder in the world, right. And we only have like 30% of remission rates for full remission. It's what I'm saying, you may see improvements, right. But usually improvements for the person studies are in this small to moderate range. The place where we do where we work, the best is anxiety, we actually have like 60 70% of remission rates for anxiety, right. But that's the best area, all the other disorders, we have weaker outcomes. So it's not about increasing access is about improving the efficacy of what we're doing. If we use these technologies, together with what we're doing, we can help more the individual that comes to our sessions, for example, if you have a parent that has depression, anxiety, and has a child, right, I can work with depression anxiety, and ask them to complement what we're doing with the chatbot that I'm creating the target for parenting, for example. Right? So where I'm giving more help to that particular individual, right? Yeah, I think we can combine some of these interventions with passive data. And here there are a lot of models on machine learning on how to predict who's going to be depressed. So if my phone realizes that I'm less active than what I'm usually on, right, the phone can predict that maybe next week, I will start having depressive symptoms. So it can start giving me interventions, right in the moment when I need them. Yes. So those type of things, I think that will help us give us give our clients a better. Yes. And the other thing that I think is important is their issue with preferences. Some humans don't want to talk with a bot at all. Right? I will not force them to do it. Other humans don't want to talk with other humans at all about what's going on with their lives. Yes. And I don't want to force them, I want to give them options, right? Well, some of the things that we see in the comments to the vote is, I trust you because you never criticize me, or I know that you don't judge me, right. And people feel that the bot is very neutral. And they are or they tell about what I'm telling you. I never told it to someone else in my life, right. And so we need to have better options. The other day, someone was talking about suicide risk. And they were saying that for those that have high severity a bot may be a good option, because they may feel more comfortable with the bot. I don't think that depends on severity. I think that depends on personality, right? Some people don't want to talk with machines, other people don't want to share what's going on in their lives with other humans because they're afraid. And this is a useful resource for those individuals. So they should have preferences. And I think it's very important not to think that we are replacing resources, we're multiplying the resources. That's what I think is the most important message of what Donna and myself are doing.
One of the things I picked up on in what you just said is, we're not just using this technology to to offer more services, more places, we're doing it to also offer better services to everybody across the board. I gotta say one thing that my current student, as I am heart loves about this conversation is that we keep coming back to evidence we keep coming back to research, we keep coming back to more than anecdotal pieces of information. So I am going to ask you a very important question and Dr. Bunge, we're going to start with you. Does this work?
The best way to know if something something works or not is to do a randomized control trials. And if you look at the randomized control trials for chatbots, you will see that there's evidence that it works. But there's a caveat. Most of those randomized controlled trials are against comparing wait list or just a book right says not comparing versus another human right for example. But what We do see is that from pre to post, there are improvements in many studies, we're seeing these outcomes mostly for depression. Now, there's something called meta analysis that that captures all the randomized control trials that have been published. And there is where you will have a really good picture, there are two meta analysis done on chatbots for for mental disorders. And both of them show that for depression, the overall outcome comparing all the studies is that you see an effect in the short term. At six months, you may not see it, right. So we know that the effect is small, and it lasts a little bit for a few months. We still need to do way better to say yes, we should give this to everyone. But we are in the same way that we provide books or self help, right? If people are in a waitlist, or they are waiting for four months to find a therapist, this is something that they can definitely do. So to your question, do they work? Yes, in the short term, at a small with a small effect size. But those chat bots were mostly rule based. And there are two different types of chatbots rule base or AI based right rule base is a create a script and as you Chloe, How are you feeling? If you say yes, I will say awesome, if you say terrible, so why right eh. So those chatbots are sometimes really more artificial, and less sensitive to the specific individual. Right. So now we're starting to see chatbots using these large language models that can be more specific to what you need. So what I expect is that in the next year as the outcomes studies of chatbots will have a better effects than the ones that we're seeing now. Something similar happened with virtual reality for exposure. The first virtual reality exposure studies were shown were showing that they were not as good as in vivo therapy, as in vivo exposure, the current status on virtual reality show that they are as good as in vivo exposure, because virtual reality became better. Right. So I'm hoping to see better effects of the chatbots in the future.
So it sounds like a yes. And and I'm going to ask Dr. Sheperis to weigh in as well.
Yeah. Always a yes. And and where is our next step? The next step is I think we talked earlier about some of the fears, provider fears, telehealth, or telemental health are that obsolescence that Dr. Bunge talked about, I'm going to be out of a job. What we're finding is that if I employ AI or a chatbot, or a digital therapeutic between sessions with clients, I'm going to make the work that I'm doing with that client better. And that is where we need to also research as therapy plus, not a replacement, not a substitution. Now, maybe if you're on a waitlist and don't have a human and that is something to do until you get to the human great. But for practitioners, I think what we would really like to see is the work of therapy is actualized between sessions anyway, how do we help build that actualizing that practice that attention, that daily mood tracking, things that I used to send home with clients on pieces of notebook paper, can now work within AI or in some type of digital therapeutic and work for them more efficiently and for the process of care more efficiently. So this is really about better care for people that we serve. So definitely, yes and.
But the yes and really liked the idea of therapy plus, you mentioned the idea of homework for therapy, which I've encountered, you know, in my therapeutic relationships and having an interactive way to do that could really enhance people actually doing it. And that's my anecdotal, individual singular story. So all right, what I'm hearing AI not really going anywhere. And so we're and we do need you mentioned the idea of a waitlist has come up multiple times throughout this conversation. We do need more mental health practitioners in the field. So maybe some people out there are thinking about, you know, I'm looking for a career change. I'm starting my first career. Maybe Maybe this field psychology, counseling, etc. Might be for me. They're going to need to be comfortable with the use of tele mental health with the use of artificial intelligence. And so let's let's take a big picture view here. What advice would you give to someone entering the mental health field as a practitioner? And what should your clinicians know about and prepare themselves for? So let me let me break that down. Let me make that a little more concise. How can students in new clinicians put themselves in the best position to be useful, effective and hired?
That's such a great question. I was part of a panel of digital therapeutics recently, and I asked the administrators of large scale clinics, what are you looking for in a new hire? And they all said clinicians who can use multipliers like digital therapeutics between sessions. So how do you get that training? Well, obviously, you come to PAU, that's the quickest way to do it. But what if you're already graduated, and you're a new clinician, become a board certified telemental health provider, when we go to any provider of health care in the United States, we're looking for board certification, become a board certified telemental health provider, get a certificate in digital care through CONCEPT, another PAU offering, show your clients that you have expertise and get that training, train in platforms, try them out, use them yourself, and learn how to talk to your clients about them, then you can look at larger scale models that are clinic level. Now, if Dr. Bunge and I had our way with things, everyone who graduated in our mental health professions would have some training in the use of technology and mental health technology to benefit their clients, they would have a specialty track, and we see that in some of our programs in our university. But we don't see it outside that much. So if you've already graduated, or are looking to add to it, do that with continuing education, it is that vital to our next step in mental health care. Dr. Bunge, I'm sure you have thoughts as well.
Yes. For the for those that are thinking of getting into this field, I mentioned a few data points that are a little bit depressing, if you will, right. I said that we're not accessing people that we're not helping them that much. What I tell my students is you should to think of this differently, right? This is exactly why you need to get into this field, because there's a lot of room for improvement. And when thinking of what are the things that could be improved in cooperation of technologies, for sure, one thing that will happen in the next years. So in the initials, we were just doing mental health through talk therapy, then there were drugs and talk therapy. Now there's going to be talk therapy, drugs, and technologies, right. And when you think of technologies, if you're starting your career now as a PhD student, you will probably finish in eight years from now, right? Or seven years from now. Think of all the technologies that were not here seven years ago, right? And think how natural they are for you today. So when you're thinking of where do you want to get trained, think of a place that is technology friendly, because you don't want to be trained during seven years of your life in something that you won't use in your career. Right? I was going in Argentina, with psychoanalysis, like Freud was doing it in Vienna in 1893. Right, the training was amazingly good. But I was training an obsolete tool, right? You want to be sure that you get training in something that you will use, at least for the first 10 years of your career, right. So I would like them to be more technology oriented rather than avoiding technology.
You've hit on two of my frequently used buzzwords is that we want to maintain relevance. And we want to be impactful with what we do. And this sounds like an excellent opportunity to do that. And if somebody is out there listening to this podcast, or maybe viewing it online, we need you if you're thinking about entering this field, we absolutely need you to do so and you can make an impact on individual lives too. Now, the unfortunate thing about this conversation is that we are running up against time and that is very sad to me because I'm really enjoying and learning a lot from this. But I do want to give you an opportunity both of you for any closing statements, anything you'd like to leave the audience with. And we will start with Dr. Sheperis and then we'll go to Dr. Bunge.
Be open. The the reality is this is something that we are moving into and embrace it because there are so many wonderful opportunities to be a helper. Most of us don't choose particularly the counseling profession because we're interested in hard science and coding, we tend to be people who are interested in narrative stories, lived experiences of our clients and helping them overcome their struggles. Those two are not incompatible. To be engaged in mental health tech and to be humanistically connected with your patient are very relevant and and opportune for what we're talking about Dr. Bunge was trained, trained as a psychoanalyst. I'm a humanistic counselor. But I love the idea that we can use tech and quantification of things that let me do what I do better, and spend my time with the person rather than on maybe some things that could be automated using some of these tools. So be open, be curious, keep that healthy dose of skepticism, but fact check and and check your sources. Thank you, Chloe.
So I like to add to what Dr. Sheperis said about being open, that we also want people to be excited about this, they have the opportunity of being impactful. You mentioned that word, and I want to highlight it right? Imagine that you have really good ideas that you put in a technological tool. And instead of helping the client that you have right in front of you, during that hour, you help millions of clients, how would you feel that's what I'm hoping to see happening with some of the interventions to be able to have parents in other places of the world telling me you know what, I've been using your chatbot, and I'm having a better relationship with my child, that will be the happiest day of my life. Probably not happiest, right? But one of the happiest days of my life, right? These type of things happened to me in the past with books, right? Having meeting people that were reading my books, or what they were using it with their clients very far away in remote places of Argentina, that's something that made me say, okay, I want to put more energy here in disseminating material, now, if you get into this field as a new student, you will be able to create things that will reach millions of people in the world, right? So you have the opportunity of becoming impactful in something that is very nice, that is helping other humans, I definitely say go for it.
This is I this is awesome. Like I'm not I'm not going to pretend I'm not fangirling out like this is just a wonderful conversation. And I want to thank you both for an incredibly enlightening talk. And just in general, I've learned a lot. I want to move forward and engage with things that I may be skeptical of. I think that's one of the biggest things I'm taking away from this. And to our audience, I want to thank you for being here and ask you to please check out both of our speakers on their LinkedIn profiles, you can learn a bit more about their work and also keep up with what's new in the field. I do want to thank our Division of Continuing and Professional Studies colleagues for all of their hard work and coordination getting this series off the ground. And when you visit the Palo Alto University website, you'll see some opportunities that they afford for continuing education credits. And you can also feel free to reach out to me Chloe Corcoran, at Alumni Relations at paloaltou.edu If you have any questions, and I'll try to point you in the right direction. Again, thank you all so much. Thank you, Dr. Bunge. Thank you, Dr. Sheperis, and again, thank you to our audience for sitting with us today. I very much hope you took things away from this, and we hope to see you in the field soon. Have a wonderful day. I hope you'll join me for the next episode, where I'll chat with Dr. Kimberly Balsam and Dr. Clark Ostlers about sexual orientation and gender identity.
