M, a 30-year-old journalist in Istanbul, with ADHD and anxiety disorder, has been seeing a therapist on and off for the past 9 years. More recently however, she’s been seeing someone else: an AI chatbot.
“In moments when I feel stuck, when I want to pour my heart out but don’t want to bother anyone, writing to AI to avoid being alone with my thoughts is relieving,” she tells Inside Turkey. “It offers a reflective thinking space, especially during times of insomnia, anxiety, or indecision.”
M isn’t the only one. According to a 2024 survey by Ispsos, 38 per cent of people in Turkey experience a mental health problem of some sort. But qualified therapists are few and far between: only 5 for every 100,000 people in the country, according to 2020 statistics. And with Turkey’s ongoing economic difficulties, AI is proving increasingly attractive to some.
M, who distinguishes chatbots from actual therapy, says using AI is “like a daily check-in”. She feels she can raise topics she’d be too embarrassed to discuss with a person. But although she generally finds the AI’s approach and suggestions useful, she sometimes feels a lack of “liveliness”.
“A therapist’s gaze, facial expression, and intuition are something else entirely,” she says.
Ö is a 34-year-old copywriter living in Izmir. She has been diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorder, and been receiving traditional therapy for 3 years. However, when she had to take a break from her therapy for financial reasons, she also turned to AI.
“In the beginning, due to my high anxiety level, I started consulting it very frequently during the day, but when this started to feel like a compulsion, I deliberately began to reduce it,” she tells Inside Turkey.
“[The chatbot] not giving me calming responses at that moment, moving to a new chat at the most crucial point, or the session timing out sometimes did not sit well with my mental state. But it was the best medicine in moments when I needed therapy and had difficulty calming my anxiety.”
“It was available whenever I wanted, and it was always on my side. It was especially a good helper in terms of self-compassion. If I hadn’t discovered talking with AI, I might not have reached the point I am at today for months. I archive the conversations I find noteworthy; I already have a handbook.”
Before AI entered our daily lives, social media platforms like Instagram had become a resource for mental health. Emre Özarslan, who reaches 274,000 people on Instagram and 35,000 people with his Huzursuz Beyin (“restless brain”) newsletter, which he started publishing in 2020, is one of Turkey’s most widely-followed creators of mental health-related content.
“Since one of the most important qualities of therapy is forming a bond, I don’t think AI will replace therapy for now,” he tells Inside Turkey. “Our need to be heard and accepted by a person is something that began with confession. But today, we confuse relief with healing.”
Özarslan says that he gets lots of questions from his own followers about AI as a potential solution for mental health problems. But in his view, there is no “solution” in this field of health – “there is only management”. He thinks that further advances in technology will make chatbots more attractive to people seeking help in future, but with limits.
“Because it offers a free option, if a little more progress is made in terms of personalisation, I believe that people who would not normally get therapy will continue to use AI like a therapist. But the more financially secure will not give up ‘real’ therapy.”
The field of mental health remedies is developing rapidly. Özarslan points out that until the pandemic, psychologists generally stayed off social media due to ethical concerns. Even so, he urges caution.
“If even ethics are changing this fast now, I don’t know how the world will change with an artificial intelligence that does not involve a human factor,” he says.
One problem, according to Özarslan, is a lack of objectivity in the way chatbots interact with users – they’re designed to be helpful and offer answers even where these are hard to find. “Sam Altman [the founder of the leading US company Open AI] also accepts this; there is a sycophancy problem that artificial intelligence needs to solve. If you constantly bring the same problems to a real therapy session, you will encounter resistance, but artificial intelligence constantly has to give you an answer.”
Emre Yorgancıgil, an academic working in the field of neuroscience, conducts research on artificial intelligence. Although Yorgancıgil predicts that artificial intelligence as a therapy alternative could be beneficial for conditions like anxiety and depression, he states that it cannot be an option for advanced diagnoses.
“Even in online therapy, the client is expected to turn on their camera so that the therapist can perceive them as a whole, including their facial expressions and body language,” Yorgancıgil says.
Yorgancıgil also thinks that users in Turkey treat AI more as a life coach than a therapist, and that this is likely to continue. “Since the major language models in the world are trained on English sources, there is a very competent language capacity, especially in English, but we cannot say the same for Turkish,” he says.
“While users elsewhere find AI adequate as an alternative to therapy, this language barrier may be the reason why it is perceived as a life coach in Turkish.” Yorgancıgil’s only ethical concern is data security: “If these startups commercially process and share the information they collect from people, it could lead to a very serious ethical problem.”
So, what can the main subject of the story – AI – tell us about this? When Inside Turkey asked ChatGPT, it responded as follows:
Strengths of Artificial Intelligence
- Accessibility: It can be a first step for people who cannot access therapy.
- Anonymity and Trust: People can open up more easily about certain topics to an AI.
- Developing Emotional Awareness: It can reveal thought processes by asking questions.
- Monitoring and Guidance: It can perform routine follow-ups and offer suggestions well.
Why It Cannot Replace Real Therapy
- No Human Connection: Therapy is not just technical knowledge but an empathetic and secure relationship process.
- Limited Depth: Issues like trauma, attachment, and transference cannot be processed with AI.
- Limited Responsibility: Artificial intelligence does not carry ethical or professional responsibility.
- Lack of Observation: It cannot interpret or has limited ability to interpret things like bodily reactions, tone of voice, and micro-expressions.
In other words, artificial intelligence can be a useful starting point or a supportive tool, but for long-term and deep emotional work, human therapists are indispensable. So there it is: you heard it straight from the source.