AI mental healthcare is here. Can it help people — or cause more problems?

Connecting virtually with a therapist went mainstream during the pandemic.

The number of U.S. mental health facilities offering telemedicine services grew from 38 percent in 2019 to over 68 percent a year later , according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

One of the most prominent companies to benefit from the shift to phone, text, chat, and video therapy remains Talkspace , which bills itself as an "easy-to-use, fully-encrypted web and mobile platform that meets HIPAA, federal, and state regulatory requirements." This summer, Talkspace entered its AI era, launching Tee.

A mental health app created with a specific large language model (LLM), Tee was developed by clinicians and trained with anonymous Talkspace data.

The app, available to anyone over 18 for $19.99 per month, is trained to identify extreme distress among patients — and to elevate such cases to human caregivers.

Dr.

Nikole Benders-Hadl, a psychiatrist who also serves as Talkspace’s Chief Medical Officer, was among those who helped develop Tee.

In Talkspace’s June announcement of the app, Benders-Hadl acknowledged the reality that many people are using products like ChatGPT for mental health needs , even though most LLMs are not created by mental health experts nor informed by therapy sessions.

That's what makes Tee different, according to Benders-Hadl.

Mashable recently connected with Benders-Hadl about the app, including how it was trained and whether it can address mental health stigma, especially among minority communities.

For the unfamiliar, what is Talkspace and Tee? Benders-Hadl: Talkspace was founded in 2012 as a virtual therapy company.

We really pioneered the development of asynchronous therapy, meaning the ability to message back and forth with your therapist at any time, whether that's sending texts, video messages, or audio messages.

We've since expanded our virtual care offering to include self-guided materials, as well as psychiatry services for medication management.

Over the course of the last 14 years, but really since about 2019, we began the development of various AI tools, really aimed at improving clinical quality and efficiency for our providers, who are all virtual.