Season 2 Episode 8: "How Can AI Help Improve Therapy?" with Zac Imel, PhD

Zac Imel, PhD is a professor and Director of clinical training in the counseling department at the University of Utah as well as co-founder and Chief Psychotherapy Science officer at Lyssn.io, an AI-powered assessment platform for behavioral health and human services. He has had over 50 papers published in academic journals, with a particular interest in assessing and improving the quality of mental health services in a variety of settings.

In this episode, Zac talks to Bruce about his work at Lyssn.io, and how they have used natural language processing to analyze psychotherapy and crisis counseling interactions. Bruce and Zac discuss how cutting edge statistical models are revolutionizing psychotherapy research by allowing for faster analysis of larger sample sizes than ever before. Bruce asks Zac to speculate on how this technology could be used to help therapists improve over the course of their careers and what else he thinks the future holds in terms of the applications of artificial intelligence to mental health services.