Does It Matter If Your Therapist Likes You? Working alliance, AI bans, and more with Dr. Jessica Flannery
For years, digital mental health tried to take gold-standard therapies and copy them into apps. Dr. Jessica Flannery was part of that wave, and she now thinks it was the wrong goal. An app isn’t a therapist in the room, and judging AI against a human therapist means we keep finding the ways it falls short instead of asking what it can do that therapy can’t.
Dr. Jessica Flannery is a clinical psychologist and developmental neuroscientist who has spent her career bringing clinical science into commercial products. She built the clinical function at digital mental health companies like Limbix, which made an app for teenagers and young adults with depression. At Akili, she worked on an FDA-cleared video game to improve attention in adults with ADHD. And at Aura, she studied how kids use AI.
We discuss:
Dr. Jessica Flannery is a clinical psychologist and developmental neuroscientist who has spent her career bringing clinical science into commercial products. She built the clinical function at digital mental health companies like Limbix, which made an app for teenagers and young adults with depression. At Akili, she worked on an FDA-cleared video game to improve attention in adults with ADHD. And at Aura, she studied how kids use AI.
We discuss:
- Why copying gold-standard therapies into apps missed the mark
- What a working alliance means when one side is an AI, and why people believe an AI likes them
- The difference between a person who could judge you and chooses not to, and an AI
- Stepped care, and where AI fits between doing nothing and weekly therapy
- What happens when you ban a technology, from TikTok to AI therapy
- The difference between therapy and being therapeutic
- What makes a therapist effective, and what congruence could mean for an AI
- Why the right amount of engagement depends on what someone needs
- Whether AI is a new wave of psychotherapy or a new way to deliver it
- What Jessica would not want AI to do in mental health
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