The Practice of Therapy

Jessica Tappana
Okay, do a little blurb okay, what kind of blurbs?

Gordon Brewer
Oh yeah, just Hi, I'm Jessica Tapana from simplified SEO. org and today we're gonna be talking about chat about AI.

Jessica Tappana
Hi, I'm Jessica Tapana licensed clinical social worker from simplified SEO consulting. Today I'm excited to talk about artificial intelligence in private practice, and probably primarily about chap GPT as it is taking the world by storm.

Gordon Brewer
Well, hello, everyone, and welcome again to the podcasts. And I'm so glad to have back with me, my dear friend, Jessica Tapana. Hey, Jessica.

Jessica Tappana
Hey, I'm so excited to be back.

Gordon Brewer
Yes, it's good. And I, you know, I can't remember the last time you were on the podcast. But, you know, Jessica, kind of behind the scenes a little bit, Jessica, and I talk probably every week is she she and I are part of a mastermind group together. And so we know each other pretty well and do a lot of fun things. So. But, Jessica, for folks that might not know you tell them a little bit about yourself and how you've landed where you've landed?

Jessica Tappana
Absolutely. Well, I am a private practice owner, I founded my practice, I like to joke I founded my practice on my maternity leave, then I did go back to my full time job. But I had done like business planning and all of that with when my daughter was born while she's six years old, so six years ago. And for me building my private practice was exciting. It was a lifelong dream. And I always envisioned being in solo practice for the rest of my life. But I started learning search engine optimization for as my marketing I didn't, at the time, everybody said, hey, you need to go out and network you need to go out and take people to coffee. But I didn't, didn't want to pay a babysitter for all that time to go to go have coffee. So at night, I studied SEO, I taught myself to get my website ranking. Before I knew it, I ranked so well that I got enough calls, I quickly transitioned a group practice now I have a pretty decent medium size, private pay group practice. And I drove I accidentally started an SEO business when my friends and colleagues started asking me for help. And now we're up to about a staff of 10 there and we help tons of private practice owners every single month with their SEO to

Gordon Brewer
Yeah, yeah, just because my go to person when it comes to SEO and just learning how to. And what I love about Jessica story is, is that she took something that was a passion of hers, and she self taught which I think there's some merit in that, but like everybody hears on this podcast, you don't necessarily have to do it the hard way. And you can certainly draw on the expertise of people like Jessica that have learned it. So but so we're just gonna we're going to talk about this new thing, although it's not so new anymore chat GPT and artificial intelligence, and how we can use it or not use it in our practices. So just gonna kind of maybe give for people that might not know about AI GPT. Maybe tell them what it is first, and then we'll just talk about maybe some different ways in which we're using it and what you're learning about it.

Jessica Tappana
Yeah, so there are so many different ways that you can use artificial intelligence. And like a lot of people I think, in our field, maybe, but particularly in my field I first heard about for blog writing. And a couple years ago, I started hearing about people using artificial intelligence like Jasper or copy.ai, or they're just countless Copyscape I can or that's a different thing. But I came to remember how many different AI tools I've tested out over the years to write blog posts. And I was really, really skeptical. I'm like that, can it really write good content, and definitely experimented with a lot that just had very stilted content that had content that just made stuff up. Had facts that weren't accurate. It was very frustrating. So my team if we tried out a lot of different things, if not very many of my team members were, like even allowed to use any AI those that were, we had extremely strict rules about how and when we were using it. Then chat GPT came along. And again, I was very skeptical and but people start saying like, Hey, this is different. Like you've gotta check this out. And we realized like we needed to play around with it. So there was like, a whole week where I think three of us were constantly in communication. And it was amazing because You can just talk to it in real language, you don't have to have any special knowledge. You just like, talk to it like friend, HR GPT, pretend you are this and tell me what to do about this. I asked it to pretend it was a veterinarian and to give me some advice about a behavioral issue with my dog yesterday, while we were driving home from vacation, we'd heard our dog have a little behavioral issue. And so I'm like, I could ask Google. And I already had chat. GPT open, though, because I was some work stuff. So I'm like, Hey, chat, GPT pretend in that's, by the way, first tip is like, tell it to pretend it's acting as whatever you want to act. And, and yeah, it gave me some ideas. But then I took that, and I went to Google and got more information.

Gordon Brewer
Yeah, yeah, I know, one of the things that I've been using it a lot for is just copywriting. And it's just, you know, like, for my for the practice of therapy website. And the other thing that I've been using, we've been using AI a lot for is, with this podcast, there's a service called swell AI. And so we can plug the audio into swell AI, and it creates our show notes and our show summary for us, and does a great job with it. I mean, it's just really amazing what it can do, and just save so much time, creates transcripts for us and everything else. So

Jessica Tappana
it's amazing how much it can do. This past week, I was doing a training and SEO training, we had to get some quick, some quick SEO, some quick content to optimize. And so a colleague and I were sitting next to each other. And we were both trying to copyright for the same website too similar but different pages, right. And so we gave it the same content. A really important note here though, is I already had a thread going where we'd already been given feeding it some information about her practice, and she didn't. And it was fascinating because the content I got was much better than the content she got. And so that part of what I love about chat GPT, as opposed to some of the others is that like if you keep the same thread going, I will even say reference as needed. Information I've already given you in this thread in chat GPT can give you better and better and better outputs and others are getting better about that. Now Jasper is another AI tool that I use, I was sharing with Gordon before the show, I used to think five or six a week at this point, um, just for different things. And a lot of them are I have a little bit of shiny object syndrome and like to try out different tools. But Jasper has like this like brand voice and these memory, it's getting to where it can remember some stuff too, but I love that you kind of interact with chat GPT and its content kind gets better and better, especially from that copywriting perspective. And you can ask it to rewrite parts like it'll from a copywriting perspective, I given extremely detailed instructions, and we can talk about some of it's called prompt engineering the prompts you give it and how to make those better. But once I give it a prompt, then I love that I'll tell like rewrite it and emphasize this or that was a bit cheesy. It is okay to tell it. It was a bit cheesy. I know that offends the computer. So I'll just say that was easy. Yeah. Rewrite it with more.

Gordon Brewer
Yeah, yeah. So do you? How polite do you get? i A lot of times I'll say please write when you really don't have to? It's a computer. I mean, so

Jessica Tappana
I say please. I do give a compliment to and I don't know, am I giving the compliments? Because that's polite? Or do My compliments actually help it give better output by by telling it like, I'm not worried about behavioral reinforcement, right, like, positive reinforcement for computer probably doesn't matter. But if I say that's great. I wonder if that helps. I think my theory is that it helps improve the algorithm. I do think it helps when I tell it, sometimes what will happen is I will give it a prompt, it will follow 75% of my prompt and it will ignore 25%. And I will respond and say, blah, blah, blah, I asked for blah, blah, blah, you blah, blah, blah, it will say I apologize for the inconvenience or oversight, and then it will fix itself. And oh, wow. That's so it's polite back to me. So yeah. I'm pretty blind to it. But it's playing GPT. And we have run a very good friendly basis. We get along very well.

Gordon Brewer
Right, right. Yeah. So yeah. So when we before we started recording, we thought we thought about a few areas that might be of interest to people. And I'm not I don't know that there's any particular order this but one, as you mentioned was blog writing and the importance for folks that don't know, one of the importance of writing blogs for your website is just simply SEO. So tell. Tell folks more about that and how you're using it for blog writing,

Jessica Tappana
you can use it in a lot of different ways to start with, you can ask it to give you ideas for blogs. If you are, let's say you are an act therapist who really loves working with middle age, middle aged men with anxiety, you can say, pretend you're an expert or acting as an expert copywriter who advises mental health therapists. Please give me a list of 50 potential blog posts I could write that would benefit. Earth, it would benefit middle aged men with anxiety written from the perspective of an act therapist who specializes in treating anxiety and it will literally give you 50 potential blog posts, then you can say, then you can give it an instructions to write number 25. Now when I give it instructions to write a blog, I will there is I believe it's Keywords Everywhere. If you download its Chrome extension, and then you're using Chrome on chat GPT, it has this thing called templates. And it will give you templates for blog writing. And so you can let's say number 25 was metaphors to explain to better explain anxiety, you could use their template for a prompt and you can just type choose the tone from a drop down menu and the writing style from a drop down menu and write in the phrase metaphors to describe anxiety and it will write you then the blog post I like to be more specific than that. I like to give it a word count, it will almost always short me I'll say write 1000 words, they'll write 700. I like to tell it to use primarily short sentences, because that's good for readability, I like to give it points to emphasize. For instance, for metaphors, I might say, use metaphors that would be relatable to topics such as, such as professional careers, high school, or college, sports, driving or the weather. So I've given it topics for those metaphors. I give it more details sometimes about tone of voice, things like that, I give it lots of really specific details. Then I hit enter it writes it, I'll almost always ask it to rewrite a section than I will. You can one of my SEO clients this week, you can then tell it to rewrite it with or to keep the rewrite, rewrite this keeping the content exactly the same and add in appropriate subheadings. And I will write your sub headings for you, which will learn that it can be Yeah,

Gordon Brewer
that's cool. That is so cool.

Jessica Tappana
Like it's like every every section of free part of blogging, you can use it. But just like anything else, the more of you you give it the better the content I like I've started, we almost always at the end up blog posts recommend that you have a section that is like a direct call to action. If you want to begin anxiety counseling, call us yada yada, it can start to sound repetitive. So I have been known to take the the Call to Action section, often old blog post Intel chat GPT rewrite this to be at the end of a blog post about blah blah blah. Keeping the same information but freshening up sounding different and it will help me rewrite it so it's still me what Google somebody's listening, Gordon. somebody's listening, you know what they're gonna say when they hear me saying all this, don't you?

Gordon Brewer
Yes, yes. Yeah, so it's all the microphones off.

Jessica Tappana
Somebody's gonna, somebody's gonna say, Jessica, don't you know, Google's gonna, like get you in trouble for using AI because that's their fear. Because Google's guidance at first was super unclear. Google came back and specified recently that what they want is quality content. That's what they care about. It's okay to use AI but they don't want you just like blindly telling AI Hey, writing a blog post about anxiety. Like, if you just tell Chad GPD write me a blog post about symptoms of anxiety. You're gonna get the same blog post. It's written for 20,000 other people it's it's only minimally if at all going to help your website, right? It's all these tips and tricks of use this ad this use this voice emphasize this. Phrase. When I'm sitting here wearing my SEO hat, it's really important that you hear me say A, you have to infuse yourself still you have to be.

Gordon Brewer
Yeah, not that well, what I've found is is just taking what they write as a template, and then going back in and correcting it and that sort of thing. What was cool was I had, I think I had used it the other day to write kind of a, it was a course on the course I'm putting together on podcasting. And I had them write kind of some promotional kinds of stuff for that. But I wanted them to write it in second person rather than I think it was writing in first person. And I didn't put that prompt in there. And I just put in rewrite in second person. And so it went back and changed everything. I could have gone through and changed it all myself. And I thought, well, that's ridiculous. I'll just tell Chet GPT to change it up for me.

Jessica Tappana
Sometimes, for me, the easiest thing to do is actually, so what I did yesterday is there was a blog post that I knew would be easier for me to write than to have it right, because I had extremely specific ideas of what I wanted in it. So what I did is I wrote an outline, it was a comprehensive guide, a Cornerstone blog post that was writing for an SEO client. So I wrote an outline, I gave out GPT outline, what I said is, as an expert copywriter, give me feedback on this outline, my intention is bla bla bla. And I gave chap GPT. My outline, it gave me feedback on the outline, then I wrote the then I use that outline, to write by hand the article because again, I have very specific ideas, I go to put that article on WordPress, which has Yoast and it screams at me that my reading levels too high. And I go to him anyway. And sure enough, my reading level is very high. Because just because very wordy. I went to grad school, just like all of you did. And we all as therapists, we tend to write it high school or a lot of times like graduate level writing, without meaning to and I had done that. So I could see that when my big problems was in certain sections, I had super long sentences. So there were a few sections, I had written article, but there were a few sections where I took the paragraph, I sent it, I went over to chat GVT I said, rewrite this paragraph to keep the same content but have shorter sentences, each sentence should have no more than 19 words. And I had chat GPT take what I had written and break up the sentences in the past, I would have done that in Hemingway. And it would have taken me three or four times as long. And I didn't do that for the whole thing. But I did do it for a handful of the paragraphs that were like, if you've ever used Hemingway It like makes it bright. It makes it like read the sentences that are really complicated. For the for the paragraphs that were like all read that I had gotten way too wordy because I was way too excited about the topic. Those were a couple of paragraphs that I just had chat. GBT, right for me. And that process worked really well for me. on an airplane,

Gordon Brewer
yeah, some folks that might not be familiar Hemingway, and you correct me if I'm wrong is kind of like grammatical checking software.

Jessica Tappana
It is. But I it's it is. And it's like, really awesome. You know, a editor is, is it. It's similar to grammerly. But better. And you actually can use both we actually sometimes. But what Hemingway does, is if you put content in there, it will tell you approximately what reading level like what grade level the reading level is. What I love is other tools will tell me you've used too much passive voice, I apparently talk a lot in passive voice. Hemingway will highlight in green, the exact word that makes up passive voice. So I know what word to change. Wow, a sentence is very complicated, it makes it red. If it's pretty complicated, it makes it yellow. So I know the exact sentence I need to simplify. It turns it as different colors for different things. And so what I like is, it's like, it's not just telling me what the problem is, but it's showing me almost step by step how to fix my writing, and how to take our brains out of academic professional therapist mode and into speak like a human that you would be speaking to in a therapy session mode because we naturally when we are talking to our clients, we we talk to our clients like their people, we explain things in a way they can. But the minute that we sit down and write it's like flashback to grad school, we start writing differently than we speak. And Hemingway is just like, walks us step by step through how to do it. So I personally like it better than like Grammarly or some of the other tools.

Gordon Brewer
Yeah, that's great. And yeah, that's, that's an important thing to kind of bullet point. There's when you're writing your copy for your website. You want it to be in language that a potential client would use. And so you know, they're not going to be talking about graduate level stuff. They're going to be talking about real life just kind of conversational kinds of things. things and problems are having. So yeah, so that to change, change gears a little a little bit, Jessica, I know you've got some pretty strong feelings about this. But I know one of the things that's happening is people starting to use AI for clinical notes and clinical things. And so give us your thoughts on that. So you

Jessica Tappana
and I have in common that we like shortcuts to make writing notes faster. I know my team uses blueprint and our practice. And they have this new thing called sessions. But like, we can click certain things. Now we'll make like little summaries of certain parts of our notes that we can copy and put into our notes. And it makes it faster. And I think our notes sound better. And you have developed super cool tools, these paths. But yeah, when you're talking about using like, chat, GPT to write your notes, the first thing I want everybody knows is that there are people reading your input on chat GPT. And so if you are telling chat GPT John Seymour, age 42, came in for a counseling session today, and we talked about his anxiety and used some mindfulness skills, write a session note, you now have broken HIPAA, because you don't have aa with with chat GPT. And there's someone read potentially reading that I don't think they read every single input, but they could and that's not secure. And so I totally understand why therapists are doing it. I love these tools. I use AI every single day, basically, in some way, shape, or form. But it is really scary to me when people start using this for clinical things, I happen to tell it something like for instance, we had a client who we were discussing pros and cons of, of reducing frequency of visits, and decided not to and so we just it was that broad. All we said is, hey, how might when how might you form an email? What might you include in an email when discussing whether or not to increase or reduce frequency of a visit of a therapeutic visits as a therapist or something like that? It was that broad, it said nothing about client's age, date of birth, where they live name, gender, diagnosis, nothing like that. And it similarly, I've been known to ask it to write a sample, a sample treatment plan for someone with anxiety that being treated using blah, blah, blah, or I'm like using these methods, write a sample treatment plan for someone with PTSD, being treated with cognitive processing therapy, using measurable goals and objectives. And then use that as a template, then if I'm actually delivering CPT to somebody, I might use that as an idea and tweak it. But I would never say I would never put more detail than that in it. Yeah.

Gordon Brewer
Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, because when I, when I created what you were talking about earlier, just the session note helper, which uses essentially, Google Forms and Google Docs and you fill out the Google Form, and then it, it creates this narrative in a Google Doc. Now, that's not necessarily an artificial intelligence, because I just use standard phrases. And it picks the, you know, what was done in the session, and then, you know, creates this standard phrase and that sort of thing. But I could see, chat GBT being done used in somewhat of the same way of being able to create your own templates for your writing your notes. So being able to go to chat be GPT. And say, if I did a cognitive behavioral, cognitive behavioral therapy session where we use cognitive restructuring or something like that, write a narrative that would explain that for a clinical note or something like that. And so you could get kind of a template kind of language that you could then shorten your shorten your session that writing by using those kinds of templates.

Jessica Tappana
I think there ways that it can be helpful and you even saying that, I've asked it. My client care team has some template emails that we use, and we always talk about, if you're gonna have templates for emails, you must individualize them all the things but just, you know, forget some key parts. And I've had abstract GPT before to help make templates for emails. And so I think that that's similar to that. But I've even gone so far as I was writing a note for her and let Are for a client that for to submit, for professional purposes, and I asked GPT, if you're going to submit this kind, if you're going to write a letter for this purpose for this organization, what tips would you have for someone writing a letter for this organization and get it gave me some very good tips, make sure this, these types of letters are often kicked back for this sort of reason I didn't tell it anything about my client, I didn't tell it. Anything, you know, literally nothing that would, that would indicate who my client was, of course, then go look at the website for the organization, and, you know, in the paperwork that the client had given me, but this was a letter that I had not written one exactly like this before. And so I kind of wanted to use all my resources to give my client the best possible letter, so I didn't have to rewrite it or have somebody spend more time on the phone. And so it was one more resource I was able to use and just ask, ask it, like, what are some tips that you have? And it was useful? I don't know that I would have used that as like my end all be all. I think it's important.

Gordon Brewer
Right? Yeah. Yeah, I think with anything that you get from artificial intelligence, you really need to vet it yourself. Don't just copy and paste exactly what it's got. And then put it into something, whether it's a blog post, or if you're using it as a prompt for clinical note or any of that kind of thing you need to you need to put some human eyes on it to make sure that it's number one, you're being ethical. Number two, just making sure that it's not to row body.

Jessica Tappana
Yeah, I just pulled chat GPT up over here so that I could see us but this, by the way, applies to all artificial intelligence pretty much to see the wording because they've changed it a few times, but it says chat GPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places or facts. I've seen this describe different ways. I've always been like, I used to tell my SEO team. Casper makes stuff up, it just makes stuff up, don't believe any facts that come from or from AI. And I will say one thing I like about GPP is if it gives me facts, I will ask it, is that a fact? And sometimes they'll say no, this is an example. I've seen it. Cite peer reviewed journal articles, like APA, like style, like the name of the author and the year and everything. Do not ever trust that first of all, then I've gone and tried to find that article and couldn't find it. And I did was doing that for a while. And then I figured out I could just ask it. Is that a real? Article? It's like, No, that is an example of a study that couldn't be done. And so it's like, just don't trust the facts is a great starting place, though, for where you can get and then explore if that's true.

Gordon Brewer
Yeah, yeah. Well, I know, we're going to probably have to have more episodes on this just in the interest of time, Jessica. But what are some other kind of maybe real quickly, some of the other kind of ethical things we need to think about and using artificial intelligence, maybe some don'ts and that kind of thing.

Jessica Tappana
Be careful when talking to our clients know that it can, I'm looking at, like I said, I have chatted up pulled up on the screen here. And it also says may occasionally produce firm instructions or bias content. So beware of the bias, be aware that it's only as good as the information that's trained on. So I think that that's important is always be scanning it for bias and being aware of that. Make sure that you're truthfully representing how you haven't haven't used it. If that's ever something that comes up. And also, just being aware with clients and talking to them. I had a client that we were trying to think of how they could different options for how they could phrase something. And so in a online therapy session, I pulled up chat GPT. But we talked about the dangers of using chat GPT to generate these ideas. And then we use chat to come up with a lot of different ideas of how the client could say something and talked about the pros and cons. But this was a client that I felt like wouldn't. I felt like had the discernment skills for us to do that. And I certainly have some clients that I wouldn't have been like, go ask Chad GBT for advice because I would not want to go use chat GPT for therapy, we definitely have seen that as it is no, there have been lots of proof out there. Just do a Google search feel and see that that is a big concern. And I think we as a as a field should be very concerned about that. We know that people AI field have expressed a lot of concern about the ethics of AI and about the capabilities. And so we definitely need to be staying on top of it. This is a powerful tool that can be used for good, but it can also be scary. And so just being being aware of that, and being mindful of how we use it,

Gordon Brewer
yeah, yeah. You know, just some of the buzz I'm hearing is, is that, you know, particularly for online sessions, you know, therapists using AI to give them kind of talking point prompts, you know, during a therapy session, which is a little scary, I think, as far as not, you know, being too dependent on it to really do clinical work. Wow,

Jessica Tappana
I hadn't thought of that. My immediate thought is, I'm like, wow, AI isn't a isn't a isn't a therapist. Sorry. Like, AI isn't a therapist. So I don't know how much I love the idea of AI helping the therapist be the therapist. But on the other hand, if you have the skills, like I wouldn't ask it to tell me how to use Gottman principles, because I wouldn't know enough about Gottman to appropriately evaluate it. But if I can't remember a term from DBT, and I am extensively trained in DBT, in DBT, and I have years of experience but haven't actively practiced it. And I was trying to remember what is that emotion regulation skill, like I could see maybe in a session, asking it like, or if I'm trying to explain dialectics the way I always have and the clients not getting it, maybe I could ask it for ideas. But I think that you have to have the knowledge to evaluate you to evaluate what it's saying, because it does have such a tendency to make stuff up that that's my fear, with therapists relying on it too much as you can end up perpetuating inaccurate information.

Gordon Brewer
Right, right. Well, well, Jessica, I know we could spend all day long, and maybe we wouldn't want to. Yeah, talking about this stuff. But tell folks how they can find out maybe more about this. I know you've done some, some blog posts and some other I think, do you have a training coming up or anything about all of this?

Jessica Tappana
Yeah, absolutely. If you go to our website, simplified Seo consulting.com, we have, check out our blog posts, we have tons of blog posts on this topic. And yes, we've been hosting a series of webinars, I don't have the training schedule up in front of me, because I'm back from vacation, sorry. But if you look on there, we keep all of the latest stuff. And we do have a variety of blog posts on this. And most importantly, we're gonna keep them coming. So this is a topic that's evolving. And even now, the advice I give is a little bit different than what I gave three months ago. And if you're listening to this recorded six months from now, definitely check out our blog, because six months from now, the blog posts, you know, we may have three new blog posts about AI that might have even slightly different advice, because this is such a quickly evolving area.

Gordon Brewer
Right, right. Yeah. Well, we'll have links here in the show notes in the show summary to get to simplified SEO, quickly. And Jessica's got some times tons of resources. And if you've never heard Jessica, give a talk or whatever, find places where you can do that. I know one thing Quick shout out for for a good friend Whitney. She's going to Jessica is going to be at the wise practice summit in October in Savannah, Georgia and Jessica will both be there. And I know Jessica, you're presenting

Jessica Tappana
I am and you're presenting to right

Gordon Brewer
No not yet. Not yet. I might be a backup along the way but not so far. I'm not I'm just looking forward to being there just attended.

Jessica Tappana
It's gonna be a great group. I was looking at it who else is going to be there and it's going to be it's going to be amazing. I I'm I can't wait and get to hang out in Savannah and the hotel looks incredible.

Gordon Brewer
Yes. Yes, it does. It's going to be a great event. So there you go. Whitney, we gave you some free advertisement. So but anyway, just calmly talking with you here. So I'll be talking with you here soon. Yeah, see you. Bye bye.