The Upside of Tech in Therapy
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Who is David Cooper and what is his background?
we're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment the last show with david cooper things are about to get a little weird a little surreal with david cooper and no i am not talking about myself i'm not just being a narcissist i'm here with seattle-based psychologist whose name is david cooper david welcome to the show thank you for having me david Our goal was to find other David Coopers, but I lament that you seem more impressive than me on paper. But honestly, that doesn't seem very hard. Let's be honest here.
I mean, I don't have a radio show, so, you know, there's that.
But you're on one. Okay, let's talk about you. You're a clinical psychologist. You have experience in neuropsychology. What even is neuropsychology?
So neuropsychology is what I originally trained in, and that is brain-based behavior, right? If you think about...
What is neuropsychology and why is it important?
emotions and all of this stuff is kind of the software, you know, the hardware it runs on is the brain. So, you know, when something goes wrong on the underlying hardware, it often produces the feelings that we have. So if you have a brain injury or, you know, some kind of illness, you can really see that in sort of some of the psychological profiles people have. So it's really the study of how those things arise, what happens when they go wrong, and how do we tell the difference?
I'm not going to play this interview for my mother because you sound competent. You sound like you know what you're doing and me not so much. I was going through... This is one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you. I was going through your website and you have some quotes and testimonials on there. One of them is from your mother. He's okay, I guess.
Is that what she says about you? Yeah, I think on a good day, you know, that's what you get sometimes. You know, it's, she thinks, you know, I think she wanted me to be a podiatrist growing up. She's like, you know, they make good money. They don't work very hard. I'm like, yeah, we get to deal with feet all day. I don't think I could do that.
I don't think I could either.
How does technology intersect with therapy?
I have a weird fascination slash fear of fungus. Peddling in fungus is what, that's a Seinfeld quote, I think. what podiatrists do.
Peddling in fungus is exactly it.
Okay, so and you are the executive director at a place called Therapists in Tech. What does it even mean for a therapist to be in tech? Are you like one minute you're coding, the other minute you're treating a patient?
In some cases, yeah. So even though I started in neuropsychology, I pretty quickly saw, you know, Apps were starting to come out and I said, man, I just wish there were people in my field smarter about these kind of things because we could do a lot of good with patients. So I actually started building apps for military service members and veterans to help with a lot of the mental illness and challenges that they were having. Um, so really there is not just in psychology, but in medicine in general is rise of clinicians who, you know, want to take that impetus of, I want to help as many people as I can and trying to adopt the economies of scale we see in tech. Right. Um, in the DOD, I had an app that had been downloaded by 4 million people and I'm like, I can never see 4 million people as a therapist, but.
I can help four million people with an app. And so really, I think that's what spurred me is how do I do the most good and how can I really use a lot of the tech tools where we see a lot of doom and gloom and horribleness in the news? How can I use them for good? How can I use them to help people? And so therapists and tech is the group of clinically trained folks who've decided to make that jump into tech.
Now, I lament that my programs sort of become the AI show because I feel like those are some of the hottest topics in the news right now. So we cover them, whatever. I'm at peace with it. When you talk about technology and therapy, large language models must enter the conversation. Do you think they're a good thing? Like, do you think they're going to help a lot of people because they give them access to therapeutic tools they wouldn't have?
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Who is David Cooper and what is his background?
0:00–0:55
2
What is neuropsychology and why is it important?
0:55–1:59
3
How does technology intersect with therapy?
1:59–4:09
4
What role do apps play in mental health treatment?
4:09–5:09
5
How can technology help reach more patients?
5:09–8:08
6
What are the benefits and risks of AI in therapy?
8:08–10:10
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Last Show with David Cooper
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