AI and psychotherapy, with Reid Kessler, PsyD

Can AI replace your therapist? It’s a real question now, not a hypothetical, and the honest answer is more complicated than either side of the argument wants it to be.

For the first episode of the relaunched show, Dr. Gabriel Lowe sits down with Dr. Reid Kessler, clinical psychologist and co-owner of Coastal Therapy Group, to think out loud about what happens when people bring their most vulnerable questions to a large language model instead of another human. They recorded this on March 6, 2026, and they say so on the record, because the technology is moving fast enough that the conversation is half timestamp, half thought experiment.

This is also a bit of a homecoming. Gabriel’s previous podcast, Hard Questions, No Answers, ran for three seasons before the editing burned him out. Bringing the show under Coastal gave it the resources to keep going and the chance to pull his colleagues into it. Reid is the natural first guest, since he’s the one who helped revive it.

Reid is upfront that he’s not an AI expert. He’s a therapist who signed up for ChatGPT early, uses it, and watches it surface in the therapy room as patients describe the conversations they’re having with it. That vantage point is the whole point. The two of them work through where AI is genuinely useful, where it’s quietly risky, and where it simply isn’t doing the thing people think it’s doing.

Some of what they get into: why introducing an AI note-taker changes the room between a therapist and a patient, even when nobody intends it to. What Harry Harlow’s monkeys have to do with the difference between information and contact. Why so much of therapy happens between sessions, in the space where one person holds another in mind. And why conflict, the friction of being misunderstood and working back from it, is something you can’t have with a tool that never gets offended. This is the territory our anchor essay, A Digital Face Will Never Be Human, digs into at length, if you want to keep going after the episode.

It’s still the person interacting with a robot. It has a lot of information and the trappings of a human, but it misses a lot. We’re embodied beings.

They don’t land on a verdict, and they’re not trying to. Reid’s instinct is that AI will take over some of the lowest tiers of mental health support, that a lot of people will get real insight they didn’t have access to before, and that some of them will get hurt in ways the tech industry isn’t built to answer for. He also suspects the very strangeness of it might push people back toward the human rooms, group therapy especially, that no chatbot can fake.

If you’ve been wondering whether the thing in your pocket can do what a therapist does, this conversation won’t hand you a clean answer. It’ll give you a better way to sit with the question.

The kind of work Gabriel and Reid describe here is what Coastal Therapy Group does every day across our Carlsbad, Encinitas, and Vista: individual therapy with doctoral-level psychologists, in a real room, with a real person. If the conversation leaves you curious about what that’s like, you can book a free consultation.

Listen to the full episode Spotify Apple Podcasts

Where Did Your Mind Just Go? is a production of Coastal Therapy Group. This episode was edited by Serena Rio.