Paper short abstract:

Using the case of the Indian-developed app Wysa, I explore how designers imagine automated therapy to help people in distress, encode situated assumptions into this app targeting a global usership, and build networks with governments, insurances, hospitals and companies.

Paper long abstract:

A growing market of mental health apps is characterized by techno-utopian imaginaries to transform global mental health. Interventionists and entrepreneurs celebrate automated therapy as innovative and cost-effective technologies that bridge a treatment gap, ‘leapfrog’ infrastructural constraints, circumvent stigma, and intervene in cases in which face-to-face interaction fails. Critics argue that mental health apps are nothing but technological fixes and band-aids, and that digital solutionism and neophilia obscures decaying mental health infrastructures and broader structural and environmental precarity. Going beyond these polarized debates, I use the case of the Indian-developed app Wysa to offer a more nuanced picture. Wysa is a chatbot, designed to be a “digital couch” or “AI friend” built into your smartphone. Using natural language processing, it aims to help users in reducing distress, get in touch with emotions and thought patterns, deal with distressing situations, and develop resilience. Anonymous, available around the clock, and fits in your pocket, the app relocates the therapeutic relationship into a digital encounter with a machine and bridges temporal and spatial obstacles. Which forms of care emerged in automated therapy? Which assumptions about self and wellbeing are encoded? Based on conversations with Wysa’s designers since 2019, I explore how they imagine automated therapy, encode situated assumptions of wellbeing and everyday working on the self, and build networks with governments, insurers and hospitals. While Wysa responds to neoliberal austerity politics, its designers envision it not only as transformative to users’ relatedness to themselves, but also imagine the chatbot therapist as potentially better-than-human.