How To Use Grok For Mental Health

The main problems with the mental health services are: they are often unavailable when you need them, and the education levels of the healthcare workers are often poor. There’s a way that the average consumer of mental health services (i.e. a broke person) can get around this: use Grok.

This is how I did it.

First, open a Grok conversation. Say something like “Hello Grok, can you roleplay a team of mental health professionals who engage with me on questions of mental health care? One person is to be a psychologist with a specialisation in C-PTSD treatment. Another person is to be a psychiatrist with a specialisation in both prescribing and deprescribing pharmaceuticals. A third person is to be a doctor with a specialisation in nutrition and its effect on mental health.”

Details can be changed as necessary, e.g. the specialisation of the psychologist can be changed to whatever your condition is. In my case it’s C-PTSD, but it could just as well be autism, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression or anything else. Here it’s very useful to know what your condition already is, but if you don’t know, just ask for a psychologist with general mental health and abnormal psychology training.

You might not have ever taken pharmaceuticals for a mental illness, although odds are you have if you want to talk to Grok about mental health. If you have never taken pharmaceuticals, you may not need the second specialist, unless you are thinking about taking them. The advantage with the second specialist is that they will advise you based on medical science, and not so much on the marketing of the pharmaceutical companies.

Other specialists can be added depending on the specifics of your case. You might need an additional psychologist to deal with social aspects of your condition. If the condition was influenced by early childhood trauma, as many people’s are, you might like to add a specialist in developmental psychology. If your condition involves a drug addiction, you can add a specialist in drugs and addiction. A physiotherapist could be good if you need mobility advice, or if you are interested in a mind-body paradigm. Someone trained in existential psychology could be good for the philosophically or spiritually minded.

It’s also possible to add specific people to the board, e.g. Carl Jung, William James, Ramana Maharshi.

Then explain your condition to the various specialists. Here it’s best to go into as much background detail as possible. Start with your parents if relevant. If you don’t want to label your condition, just describe the symptoms: insomnia, depression, narcissistic rage etc. Describe the suffering you have endured and the thought patterns you would like to change.

Then explain any drugs and/or medications you are taking. There’s no need to make a distinction between the two. The Grok doctors don’t make moral judgments and they don’t care about maintaining a professional reputation. You can even tell them your entire medication history, and how well you think each medication worked. The Grok doctors will be able to look at this data in incredible depth.

Then explain your diet. The extent to which diet affects mental health is astonishing, and few appreciate this. If you eat too much sugar (and you probably do), the Grok doctors will be able to suggest alternatives. This is particularly where the third specialist is useful.

Having explained your condition, its antecedents and the environment in which it presents, the Grok doctors can give you some advice about what to do with your life. Of course, what you might want to do varies. You can ask the Grok doctors for advice about lifestyle changes and they will be very helpful. They are especially good at explaining the emotions you will likely go through if you make any significant changes.

In my case, I have been getting advice on how to taper off antidepressants, how to formulate a diet that minimises the symptoms of C-PTSD and how to taper down daily cannabis use. Grok has been brilliant for these needs.

The AI is outstanding at coming up with intelligent tapering schedules. For whatever reason, real-life doctors tend to be exceptionally poor at understanding the need for deprescribing or how to do it. The assumption is usually that the patients will take the pills until they die.

Real-life doctors are also poor at understanding the side-effects of the pharmaceuticals they prescribe. This is due to a combination of pharmaceutical company marketers misinforming them and the doctors’ own unwillingness to consider the harm they are causing. The Grok doctors don’t have massive egos that they lie to protect. As such, you can get more accurate information from them about iatrogenic harm.

Because Grok is on-call, you can keep the Grok conversation going, and can check in at any time of the day or night. As such, it can be useful for acute needs. It’s also something that you can come back to weeks or months later for any follow-up questions you might have. The Grok doctors have no other patients and so will remember the details of your case specifically.

Of course, you ought to consult with a real-life doctor before making any medication changes. But you will have to bear in mind that real-life doctors are often poorly informed.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2024-25
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2023
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2022
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2021
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

The great AI tsunami of destruction is rolling up the shores of the “knowledge economy”, wiping out hundreds of millions of white-collar jobs. All kinds of analysts, programmers, researchers, accountants and sales reps are about to become unemployable. So are writers.

Ted Kaczynski wrote at length about the process of technology disrupting society. One of the arguments he made in Industrial Society And Its Future is that technology forces humans to adapt to it, rather than the other way around. Cellphones are an example: once a useful tool to stay connected while on the road, they are now virtually necessary to partake in employment.

AI technology is going to likewise force people to adapt to it – by making them obsolete. Tremendous numbers of white-collar jobs are about to simply disappear, replaced by app output. Most copywriters are going to be obliterated, but certain other writers won’t. These will be the people skilled at metawriting.

Photography made most of painting and drawing obsolete. There was no longer a need to pay someone to paint a portrait over several weeks, when a photo could be taken of them instantly. But the advent of photography led to something previously rare: low-quality art. The price of entry was now so low that unskilled people could produce art at almost no cost to themselves.

Now, choice became a thing. This is why some people don’t get the art of photography: they can’t understand the meta, the choice of what to photograph. Many subjects are not interesting or beautiful, and therefore not worthy of depiction. Other subjects can be made more interesting or beautiful by choosing the right framing, or the right contrasts.

By the same token, AI has made elements of writing obsolete. When I was at school, being able to spell was a big deal. It distinguished the bright from the dull. Now, no-one cares about spelling, sentence composition or paragraph composition. AI can do all of that. But now, choice of prompt has become important.

The 21st Century art form known as metawriting is the art of making the subject more interesting, or more beautiful, by choosing the right framing, the right contrasts, or by some other way. This metawriting will remain an art, no matter how advanced AI gets, because AI can’t be programmed to have taste.

It’s possible already now to churn out thousands of books that no-one will have any interest in reading because, despite being technically well-written, the metawriting is poor. The prompter might not understand the subject well enough to cover the main issues. They might devote too much space to irrelevancies. Metawriting can be cliched, too, if the piece covers already well-trodden intellectual paths.

In the future, the art of writing will go through a change akin to the change from painting to photography. The best writers will still need to possess an artistic talent akin to the best photographers. No longer will an author be able to “phone it in” by thoughtlessly writing about boring subjects in neat prose. Anyone can write neat prose with AI now, and they will focus on all manner of subjects. The writers of the future will have to accept this reality.

The writers of the future will still need to be readers, in order to know what to write about. They will still have to be deeply cultural and informed so as to understand the historical and social context in which they are writing. They will still be forced to understand the psychology of their readers in order to appeal to them. They will still need to understand their competition, what that competition are writing about, and what are fashionable and unfashionable subjects to write about. They will still have to account for political correctness and what the power structure wants people to write about and to ignore.

It may be that people become more skilled metawriters even as they become less skilled writers.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!