Should AI Chatbots Be Used to Train Future Clinical Psychologists? A Clinical Psychology Podcast Episode.
- Connor Whiteley
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
Across all of society, artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots are becoming more common and they’ve seeped into all aspects of our daily lives. From internet searches to education to our workplace, artificial intelligence is everywhere. However, there is a debate currently going on about whether artificial intelligence should become a part of the clinical psychology doctorate training. Therefore, in this clinical psychology podcast episode, I’ll reflect on my experience, my thoughts and I’ll propose what this debate means for our great profession. If you enjoy learning about cyberpsychology, psychology training and the future of psychology, then this will be a great episode for you.
Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Beyond The Lecture Volume 7: 20 Reflections on Clinical Psychology, Mental Health and Psychotherapy. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.
Should AI Chatbots Be Used to Train Future Clinical Psychologists?
Last week, I took part in a new psychology study that a lecturer who I’m friendly with was running and he wanted to conduct his study using clinical psychology master's students. Besides from his preferred research sample, I didn’t really know anything else about the research study. Artificial intelligence had been mentioned but besides from that, nothing else was said.
His master's students emailed me a day later and we arranged a date and time to meet. I mention this because here’s a little tip, if you are contacting a research participant and you have no idea what they look like and if they have no idea what you look like. Please, do not ask them to meet you in a public space that will be very busy.
Give them a specific room or location. Ideally the place where you’re going to be doing the experiment.
Anyway, the study involved me having 12 minutes to ask questions to this chatbot that was pretending to have anxiety and depression. I needed to interact with it how I would with a client in the real-world during the psychological assessment.
I needed to find out their presenting difficulties, their life situation, how long they have had their mental health difficulties amongst other factors.
To do this, I needed to type in my questions to the chatbot and a second or two later, it would give me a response. That answered my question very well and similar to how a real client would answer it with the pauses, nervousness and accurate wording.
When the 12 minutes were up, the researcher came back into the room and she asked me a few questions about my experience, would I recommend using this chatbot in clinical psychology training and how could it be improved amongst other questions.
Personally, I want to reflect on this study because I strongly believe that this will be used in the future of clinical psychology. Artificial intelligence is already dominating and revolutionising our world. For example, there is artificial intelligence baked in all electronic devices these days allowing for smarter, easier and faster search. It might not always be accurate but it is there.
A lot more tools and pieces of software are incorporating artificial intelligence, businesses are using AI more and more to make work easier and more effective. You cannot escape artificial intelligence.
Even within clinical psychology, artificial intelligence is already being used to deliver psychological therapy as part of mobile mental health apps as I discuss in my book Could Apps Improve Our Mental Health? Therefore, it is truly impossible to escape the impact of artificial intelligence on our profession.
Moreover, I do realise that my responses are slightly biased in a way because I am not part of the ideal research sample. The aim of the study I later found out was to see if clinical psychology masters students’ opinions on whether this chatbot should be used in professional training.
Nonetheless, it’s important that this chatbot should be researched with actual trainee clinical psychologists because they have the training, they have the professional experience and they have the clinical expertise to “truly” judge if this chatbot is remotely effective at developing the psychological assessment skills that qualified clinical psychologists need.
Just a reflective note.
Should Artificial Intelligence Be Used In Clinical Psychology Training?
I’ll start off with what I like about this training chatbot. I appreciated how it responded very realistically, similar to how a client would in the real-world. It paused, conveyed nervousness and sometimes the client didn’t know how to answer the question I was kindly asking them.
Also, I remember that the majority of answers involved the client picking at the fabric of their sleeve to show that they were nervous. This is similar to what a lot of clients would do in a real therapy session, so I will admit that it’s realistic in that sense.
In addition, it was good how the chatbot was a little difficult to get to open up. Similar to working with some clients who you need to find a certain angle or line of questioning before everything starts to flow out of them and you can really start to get to the core of their mental health difficulties.
However, I did have a few issues with the chatbot and this is why I do not believe artificial intelligence and chatbots should be used in clinical psychology training.
Firstly, my issue is that whenever you do psychological assessments, besides from getting certain information that you need from clients, you need to use a range of therapeutic skills. For example, you need to show active listening, you need to respond to what the client is saying so they feel listened to, and you need to phrase your questions in non-judgmental and compassionate ways.
However, the issue with using an AI chatbot is that because I only had 12-minutes to try and get as much information as possible, and I was having to type out each question. After a while, I stopped trying to respond carefully and considerately to what the chatbot was telling me. I was just typing in my questions and asking them.
The chatbot wasn’t able to tell this wasn’t how I was actually meant to ask questions, because the study wasn’t looking at my ability to conduct an effective assessment.
As a result, I don’t believe that the chatbot would be useful in developing the interpersonal skills that psychological assessments require, because it doesn’t get me to practice how you need to ask them in the real world.
A second issue with the chatbot being used in training is that it doesn’t reflect the real world. In a real psychology assessment, even one on video call, I would be able to see the client, read their body language and hear their voice. As well as I would need to think about my body language a lot more because the client would be interpreting my actions too.
Yet a chatbot isn’t a real person and whilst the text responses did give me some details about the client’s body language, it is one thing to read it and quite another to see it and then reformulate my questions and approach based on that body language feedback. As well as using a chatbot fails to get me to think about my own body language and how I am presenting myself to the client.
These factors could all harm or help the therapeutic alliance to form, and if the client is uncomfortable round me then that will have a large negative impact on the assessment.
Finally, I have a minor issue with how chatbots might be used in the training programmes. As an aspiring clinical psychologist, I want to do the doctorate of clinical psychology because I want to help people, I want to help make the world a better place and I want to improve lives. I can only achieve these aims if I am able to talk and interact with real clients, interacting with a chatbot will not help me.
Therefore, I think there could be a perception issue within clinical psychology. If clinical training providers want to use chatbots as part of training then I think they will need to work on selling this idea to trainee clinical psychologists. They will need to sell them on the idea that chatbots are useful, that chatbots will not take away from their real-world experiences and that the trainees are still going to be getting their money’s or time’s worth out of the training programme.
Since I believe in the future because of how advanced artificial intelligence is getting, I imagine anyone will be able to get or create a chatbot that can pretend to be a client with depression or anxiety. In this future, this chatbot might be nothing new so in an extreme case, why should people join a doctoral programme to become fully qualified when they can simply use the same artificial intelligence chatbot in the comfort of their own home?
On the whole, I think there is a place for artificial intelligence in clinical psychology training, but I want us as a profession to be extremely careful. We work with humans so trainees must always get experience with other people before some AI chatbot that will never be as good or useful in the development of the key therapeutic skills that clinical psychologists need.
What do you think?
Should chatbots be used in training or not?
I hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode.
If you want to learn more, please check out:
Beyond The Lecture Volume 7: 20 Reflections on Clinical Psychology, Mental Health and Psychotherapy.. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.
Have a great day.
Clinical Psychology Reference
Whiteley, C. (2026) Beyond The Lecture Volume 7: 20 Reflections on Clinical Psychology, Mental Health and Psychotherapy. CGD Publishing. England.
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