The Benefits of Minding Your P’s and Q’s with ChatGPT

The Rowe & Associates May 2024 team day proved to be another invaluable opportunity to come together for a morning of learning, growth, and sharing innovative ideas. These professional development opportunities enable us to provide the most up-to-date care and support to our clients.

The day kicked off with a talk by Dr. Andrew Parkin, Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist, covering general principles and considerations, including the benefits and side effects, of medications for children and adolescents with mental health difficulties.

You might wonder, isn’t learning about medications swerving out of a psychologist’s lane a bit? However, there's ample evidence that shows a multidisciplinary approach to a child’s mental health care is the best kind of care. Working alongside our colleagues in white coats and having some knowledge of how they come to their decisions helps us to:

• Integrate this information with the strategies we use in therapy.

• Look out for medication side effects from an informed viewpoint.

• Educate clients about their medications to help them make informed decisions.

• Monitor compliance and discuss the importance of consistency in medication adherence.

• Navigate stigmas.

• Keep clients safe and respond to potential medical emergencies.
  

Then for something completely different... Clinical Psychologist Danielle Graber blew our minds with a presentation and demonstration of the benefits of using AI in clinical practice. During her presentation, Danielle recalled a time when she was starting out her tertiary study, and universities were hesitant to allow students to hand in papers typed by a word processor because it was going to be “the end of free thinking and thought.” Now, we are looking at using language learning models to assist with what actually goes in the paper!

Closer to home, for psychologists, the key benefit of using AI is that it can halve our administration time, allowing for more client care time – and with that, everyone wins!

Talking about this with our colleagues is so important because incorporating AI into practice needs to be done in a safe and ethical way. With anything technological, the only certainty is that laws and regulations lag many years behind what the technology is capable of, so it’s crucial to stay within the realms of what you are comfortable doing.

Also, be aware… ChatGPT is learning your voice over time, so remember your manners!