I never thought AI could be used for mental health - Eleanor's story
User Story / 3 min readEleanor*, 35 from Italy, uses Wysa to help her manage panic attacks and anxiety. This is her story:
"I have suffered from panic attacks and anxiety since I was 22 yrs old, so over a decade now. I have had both psychotherapy (which I continue to have) and medication to help. This combination helped me improve a lot after a few years, but in the last couple of years I have had a relapse. Thankfully it’s not often as acute as when I was younger, but I’ve started to have panic attacks in particular situations and have also developed health anxiety. I live quite a stressful life, and find that my job as a researcher can be very demanding and have a level of job insecurity, which has worsened my mental health.
One of the things I find hardest is the fear or not being able to live as I was living before I had anxiety, and not being able to do the things I love with a light heart and without anxious thoughts. Although I speak quite freely about my mental health, and I am not ashamed of having mental health issues I wanted something else to use to help me. That was how I came to Wysa. I was looking for an app that could help me relaxing and calming down anxiety, to include in my daily routine. The reviews seemed good so I gave it a try.
The meditations, relaxations exercises and sleep’s stories really helped me calming down when I had panic attacks. They are great before bed as they can ease falling asleep. And chatting with the AI helped me to switch my anxious thoughts into more rational ones, when I was particularly worried about my health. I have some experience with chatting with AI before, but I have never thought that it could be used for mental health issues. I thought that if you knew that you were chatting with an AI tool, you could not had any benefits, and that AI could sound simply fake, so I was quite surprised at how helpful Wysa is.
It helped me building a routine where I incorporated relaxation techniques, especially before going to bed. This, in turn, helped me realizing that I can relax if I want to, and that anxiety doesn’t last forever.
Now that I am feeling a little better I am not using it as often, but it is nice to know that in case my anxiety gets worse, I have this simple tool on my phone that can help me relaxing and rephrasing my irrational thoughts. I think it is a great tool to help when other means are not available or a panic attack strikes. We cannot have psychotherapy sessions everyday, but we can build a better daily routine to help us coping with stress and anxiety, and definitely Wysa can help doing that."
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