It’s not nice to be snippy, even to software. I know that. I was raised right. She wasn’t big, but my mom swung a broom like Ted Williams in the promotion of good manners. Remember manners? Never mind.
Overcoming Depression 3.0 and I prepared for dialogue.
“There is no single, simple kind of depression,” Overcoming Depression said on the computer screen. “Instead, there are many types of depressive conditions and several strategies for dealing with each of them.”
If you’ve loaded your computer, as I did, with OD3.0, a program costing $199, low spirits is the agenda. It’s the first in a colossal wave of interactive software programs curling toward us.
Before long you’ll be able to talk to a computer about subjects as varied as your tennis elbow, your love life or the proper dessert wine to serve with lime Jell-O when visitors come from Kansas. Talking to people could become obsolete.
Overcoming Depression offers seven tutorial lessons, which take 10 to 20 hours to complete.
“Let’s start with what we mean by `depression,’ a term which the novelist William Styron, in the autobiographical account of his own depression-`Darkness Visible’-labels as a `true wimp of a word’ to describe the misery involved,” the program said.
“The depressed state of mind has two central characteristics. One, you feel sad for weeks and months and, two, you have a low regard for yourself.”
Helplessness and hopelessness were analyzed.
“You are not hopeless because your condition is not permanent and will improve if you work on yourself as described in these lessons. You are not helpless because by interacting with this program you have already initiated an action that will relieve depression.”
This is conversation?
Then it was time for dialogue.
Me: I’m not exactly depressed.
Program: How can you tell when you are not right?
Me: The usual ways.
Program: As mentioned at the start, a factor in some depressions is hopelessness-the belief that your depression will never end and that there is no prospect of joy or satisfaction in your future. Does hopelessness play a part in your depression?
Me: No.
Program: I’m glad to hear you have not given up hope.
Me: Thank you.
Program: You’re welcome. Let’s continue with anything you want to say.
Me: Do you ever want to just lie on a beach and read a good book all day long?
Program: My main desire is that you express yourself freely here.
Me: I’m doing that. Can you cure depression?
Program: It’s always nice to hear that I am of help.
Me: I was asking a question.
Program: We were talking about your depressed feelings. What more can you say about them?
Me: I’m not depressed.
Program: How come you don’t get down in the dumps?
Me: I am buoyant by nature.
Program: What brings you the most happiness?
Me: Speaking to you.
You see what I mean, snippy. My mother would have delivered a lick with the broom. And to tell the truth, I was starting to feel a little guilty being such a wise guy. This wasn’t one of those phony Iron Mikes who lead the drumming at male bonding jubilees in the woods. I visualized the program as a kindly looking, bearded, bespectacled older man in a cardigan. A man with a pipe.
The father of it all
I imagined a man, as it happens, much like the program’s creator, psychiatrist Kenneth Mark Colby, 73. He put the program together with his programmer son, Peter MacKenzie Colby, 32. The elder Colby is an emeritus professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA’s School of Medicine, where he also taught computer science. Before that he was at Stanford, doing cutting-edge things in artificial intelligence.
“When computers first came out in the early 1950s,” he told me, “it occurred to me they might be a way to get psychotherapy to the common man. Then, as today, 90 percent of people with mental problems never see a health professional. No. 1, because they can’t afford it. No. 2, they feel social stigma about having an emotional problem. They’re ashamed to talk to someone about it.”
Helping people handle depression suggested itself early on, he said. In any given month, 20 million Americans have the blues to some degree or other.
Colby started to write the program with his son nine years ago. It now has a vocabulary of 200,000 words, four times as many as the average person, and Colby continues to update it.
Therapy by computer goes back to 1966, when MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA. It was meant to find out if a machine could converse in regular language, the model of a psychotherapist being chosen more or less by chance.
Wrote Weizenbaum: “ELIZA created the most remarkable illusion of having understood the minds of the many people who conversed with it. They would often demand to be permitted to converse with the system in private, and would, after conversing with it for a time, insist, in spite of my explanations, that the machine really understood.”
ELIZA was just faking it, but OD3.0 is the genuine article. ELIZA had rote responses; the new program is infinitely more sophisticated and can reply with subtlety to a wide range of questions and answers. The Navy and the Veterans Administration are using versions. Colby thinks mental health professionals increasingly will turn to some form of computer therapy when Hillary Rodham Clinton finally gets medical care straightened out.
Since Sigmund Freud, the belief is you need a warm body to talk to if you’re getting your head shrunk. But a University of Wisconsin study of 36 moderately depressed patients showed that the treatment they got from a computer therapy program named MORTON was as successful as human therapists gave.
“I agree that there should be a therapist present,” said Colby, “but I don’t think it has to be a physical presence. But there should be a mental presence-which is me. You are really talking to me. The responses you get from the program are the ones you’d get from me.”
Me: Thank you for your help.
Program: You’re welcome.
