- Read the disclaimer.
- Plan specific steps to get back to a calm and safe baseline (see my page on self-regulation exercises if you need ideas, and call or text a crisis line if needed).
- You can try this on your own or in combination with a therapist. Of course you know I’m going to have a bias in which to choose, but anecdotally people have reported being helped by both ways of doing it.
- Out of well-known AIs, https://claude.ai/ has the best empathy and conversation flow followed by https://chatgpt.com/ but they pose inherent privacy issues.
- “Local” models that run on your own device are good too and eliminate privacy issues. These models are now pretty good at empathizing and at specific tasks like providing coping skills, reflecting emotions back based on what’s in your own words, and summarizing. My own experiments with these models were consistent with reports posted online by people being helped by Claude but without the privacy issues.
- Using these local models requires a baseline knowledge of installing and running new software. On a computer with 8GB or more RAM, install ollama. Use it to load and run the lfm2.5-thinking model with the following command: “
ollama run lfm2.5-thinking“. Ask it some questions. Try giving it directions to get it to respond in different tones or with different levels of confidence.- lfm2.5 is the the quickest to get up and running. Other models can sometimes give somewhat better answers but can take longer, or need more hardware, or take more tweaking to run smoothly (gemma4:e2b and qwen3.5:2b are good bets).
- Give your model additional concrete instructions on how to respond. That can help keep the conversation on the rails. For example: “Do not respond with undue confidence. Provide references for more information if possible. Ask clarifying questions if needed. Challenge me if my thinking on a topic seems rigid or limited.”
- Asking for help in specific ways probably gives better help on average than being general. Think: “Give me exercises to do when I’m feeling overwhelmed” or “What steps can I take to help myself get out of bed in the morning when I don’t feel like I can?”, not “How do I feel better?”