Mashable Voices Look Up Trending Now Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series AI mental healthcare is here. Can it help people -- or cause more problems? Talkspace now offers AI therapy. We connected with the company's Chief Medical Officer on the new offering. Neal joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2024, editing and writing stories about digital culture and its effects on the environment and marginalized communities.

Mental-health therapy involves a complex conversation flow in which patients and therapists continuously negotiate what should be talked about next. For example, therapists might try to shift the conversation's direction to keep the therapeutic process on track and avoid stagnation, or patients might push the discussion towards issues they want to focus on. How do such patient and therapist redirections relate to the development and quality of their relationship? To answer this question, we introduce a probabilistic measure of the extent to which a certain utterance immediately redirects the flow of the conversation, accounting for both the intention and the actual realization of such a change. We apply this new measure to characterize the development of patienttherapist relationships over multiple sessions in a very large, widely-used online therapy platform. Our analysis reveals that (1) patient control of the conversation's direction generally increases relative to that of the therapist as their relationship progresses; and (2) patients who Figure 1: Top: Examples of attempted redirection, both have less control in the first few sessions are realized (left) and unrealized (right). Bottom: Example significantly more likely to eventually express where redirection is not attempted.

You've probably been there: Something stressful is happening in your life, and you're feeling more anxious than usual. You'd love to talk to someone about it, but you don't know who to turn to. Therapy is one option, but A) it can be crazy expensive, and B) you don't want to be that person who has to see a shrink. Turns out, there is no that person. Roughly one in every five Americans, or about 43 million people, suffers from mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.