Enthusiastically matching the energy of an anxiously attached partner is a rite of passage many would rather not have walked.

That's a pretty fair point to what might explain why AI relationships are so appealing to some people.

I'd be a fun observational study to survey folks in AI relations and see if anxious attachments are over-represented.

Mere talk therapy is infamously useless for attachment trauma, which is relational and somatic

Begs the question of whether the underlying pathology is attachment trauma or some other delusional fixation! I don't doubt most of the people in this predicament are vulnerable for one reason or another. I made a much more specific claim, about delusional obsessive fixation; I did not claim that their underlying mental health issues could be fixed straightforwardly.

It’s a great question, and I think it’s not exclusive.

Obsessive limerent obsession can be driven by reward circuits, and those _can_ be extinquished by more straight-forward therapy, but if it’s driven by unmet emotional needs, it’s often quickly replaced by some other maladaptive coping mechanism (hopefully slightly less unhealthy).

People with severely disordered attachment _will_ seek out humans, again and again, to fill those unfulfillable needs, and leave bodies and psyches in their wake.

So I think there is a case to be made for harm reduction.

I agree, but not because I think that those users had stable attachment patterns and have been corrupted by an unscrupulous company, but because there is unacknowledged, often hidden, but severe pain in a large % of the population.

Which is your own reaction, which is a result of your own wounds.

Now imagine someone else coming to the same conclusion about you.

I’m not sure “AI psychosis” is even right for many of those users who formed attachments to their “companions”.

Psychosis is a real risk for schizophrenia spectrum disorders, but a lot of those relationships look to be rooted in disordered attachment.

Where, pray, is the sexism?

This seems to be an instance of “if you hear the dog whistle you’re the dog”

They're the only board members who aren't notable. After the ousting the board consisted of a prominent CEO in D'Angelo, a prominent researcher in Sutskever, and Toner and McCauley. It's a grouping of two randos, not two women.

Didn't you just answer your own question?

You have three people, one of them is at least quite well known to the outside world, or at least his / her company is well known along with an ex Facebook CTO title.

You have two people left, we have no idea what he / she is, their work are not public outside of specific domain, and no Public / PR exposure to even anyone who follows tech closely.

Those two people we group them together. And they happened to be woman. ( At least we assumed their gender ). And we are now being called sexist? Seriously?

Slow metabolic rate triggers a flight or fight response, just like a panic disorder, so no wonder there is an intersection of symptoms.

But there is a big difference: slow metabolic rate leads to eventual cell death (metabolic encephalopathy), while panic disorder is physiologically harmless in comparison. It's hard to distinguish between the two, and not every doctor is able to do that.

As an interesting observation, a metabolic disorder is not responsive to antidepressants alone.

If all you need is someone to talk with, there is no difference.

Because your friend may be too close to your problems to be of help, may not speak with candor to avoid harming you/your relationship, may be an active participant in your problem, may have no experience talking/thinking about your problem limiting their ability to offer useful feedback…

Without even broaching the diagnosis and treatment of mental health conditions, there are any number of reasons why paying a neutral third party to discuss your problems could be preferable than talking to a friend at a bar. Nor are they mutually exclusive.

Talking to anyone is pretty good, so you're not far wrong.

A counsellor or therapist has training - think of it as a mental toolkit - to help explore things with you. Depends on their exact approach but most of them wont give advice for example, they will just ask question or reflect what you say back to you to encourage you to figure it out yourself. Or they might look for parallels between your early life and current life, as most people follow repeated patterns in their relationships (or so the theory goes). At least 75% of their skillset is just listening and occasionally asking good questions which is an underrated skill.

There are many different flavours of therapy/psychotherapy/counselling and sometimes the adherents get quite religious about it (ask an integrative therapist what they think of CBT for example). But research generally shows that most 'talking therapies' are roughly equal in effectiveness and the main factor for success is the relationship between the client and therapist - i.e. whether they click. (putting aside for the moment the tricky questions about how to measure effectiveness of therapy - what does improvement look like? how do you have a control group?)

There's a thing called the 'Dodo Hypothesis' - that "all empirically validated psychotherapies, regardless of their specific components, produce equivalent outcomes" - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict

People heavily invested in a particular brand of therapy dont like to hear about the Dodo Hypothesis but broadly I think its an optimistic conclusion - talking to people helps, and if you find the right one, talking to a specially trained listener can help more.

> Depends on their exact approach but most of them wont give advice for example, they will just ask question

Because general advice is rarely useful in such cases, like you can see in almost all of comments giving advice in this topic. Most of them have at least one "yeah, but in my case...".

Bold of you to assume someone with significant issues has a friend, especially when friendship statistics (especially for men) are plunging through the ground.

Not necessarily, agere is implied in colloquial usage.