Why do therapists need double caution with AI?
Because their material is doubly sensitive: it identifies a person and exposes their inner world — mental state, crises, family relationships. Data-protection regimes worldwide treat mental-health information as a specially protected category, and professional ethics go further still.
What can AI still do for a therapist?
The writing around therapy, not the therapy itself: turning bullet points into a structured session note, drafting a referral letter, organizing a case summary for supervision, or softening the language of a letter to parents. All of it works when the client appears as PERSON_001.
- Session notes — turning raw bullets into a structured, professional note.
- Referral letters — to a physician, school or insurer, in language fit for the recipient.
- Supervision prep — organizing a case description for consultation, with no identifying details.
- Sensitive wording — phrasing a recommendation or assessment precisely and kindly.
What identifies a client even without a name?
In therapy, context identifies as strongly as a name: age plus town, a rare profession, an unusual family event, dates and institutions. A note about 'a 40-year-old from a small town who lost his brother in an accident' is identifiable with no ID number at all.
- Name, ID and phone number — the obvious part.
- The combination of age, town and occupation — especially in small communities.
- Unique events: an accident, a legal case, an admission to a specific facility.
- Family members' names, the children's school, the workplace.
What does a safe workflow look like in a practice?
- One iron rule: no text about a client enters an AI tool before anonymization.
- Replace the name with a consistent token — PERSON_001 — and do the same for family members, town and institutions.
- Blur telling details: 'a loss in the family' instead of the specific story, when the detail isn't needed for the wording.
- Clean the file's metadata — the Author field and comments expose names even when the text is clean.
- Restore the real details only in the client's record, on your own machine.
The principle is the same one guiding clinicians who use AI: the tool gets the professional content, never the identity. The general list of what should never be pasted into a chatbot applies here with extra force.