Automated online robot psychologist sorts your life out

BOFFINS FROM Holland’s Institute for Eclectic Psychology, have developed an online robot shrink, they’ve dubbed Mindmentor.

Clinical psychologists, Drs Jaap Hollander and Jeffrey Wijnberg, reckon an hour with the online psychologist can turn gibbering idiots into useful members of society. Well, almost.

A cosy heart-to-heart with a completely automated shrinkbot may help the wayward resolve issues and achieve goals, the boffins claim, with no live human intervention whatsoever.

A Mindmentor session takes about an hour and its creators claim it works best on problems related to stress, family, relationships, motivation, insomnia, worry and arguments with mates or colleagues.

It also professes to allow its distressed clients remain completely anonymous, in keeping with the patient/therapist confidentiality model. It certainly has the advantage that, if the subject turns out to be completely batty, the therapist doesn't have to be in the same room as them.

The Dutch doctors don’t recommend Mindmentor for people suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or hard drug addiction. Soft drug addiction is apparently considered a normal state of mind in Holland, so don’t expect any help from Mindmentor on that front either.

The is apparently based on five different psychological systems. The first being Neuro linguistic programming (NLP), which reckons the words we use to describe problems reflect quite a bit about the nature of the problem itself and that a person’s attitude to something can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The second is Projective Testing. This is better known as the Rorschach inq-blot test, where a person is made to look at bat or butterfly-shaped blobs and is told to reinterpret them as a way of bringing unconscious knowledge into consciousness.

The third system is Provocative Therapy which challenges a patient through the use of reverse psychology (no it doesn’t, yes it does…). Client centered therapy works on the assumption that a person can be helped by repeating what they say in a more positive way. Finally, the software also uses Pavlovian or “classical” conditioning to connect certain emotional responses to mental images.

Hollander and Wijnberg claim that research into the effectiveness of the system back in 2006 showed that out of a client pool of 1600 “patients”, Mindmentor was able to solve their problems at an average of 47 per cent in one session.

A session with the Mindmentor shrink bot will set you back 4.95 Euros, or 40 Euros for 10 sessions.

Or send us an email detailing your problem and we'll send you an estimate of what it'll cost to fix. µ