Today I had my first therapeutic session with a patient.
That's how I can put it. But I'm not a doctor, and it's not my specialty at all. Despite I do study how the brain works, I'm not qualified to understand how to fix it. Clearly, we do not fully understand how the brain works, so what can we say about other things? But from the movies and some literature, I know that one mainly needs to lead a person and help them to uncover their problems.
This was just a chat with an acquaintance of mine. The situation is dark. As I understand, they suffer from harassment from neighbors. Not physical but the person is taking it very emotionally which of course brings some physical consequences by having constant stress. As a person, who likes mysticism, they explain their problem through some ritual. But as a modern person, they also claim that AI is involved in it. This is how they started asking about my professional expertise in AI.
I explained that AI is a stupid algorithm and started asking about non mystical details. But that's where the conversation was sliding and going into the new circle. English is not their first language. Usually, they speak fluently, but during this session, I needed to ask many similar questions just to understand what is going on. So it felt like a language barrier, but more likely this way they were protecting privacy. And also because my questions implicitly contained the ignorance of their explanation.
I always wanted to discover something paranormal and analyze it with all my knowledge in physics, cognitive science, and psychology. Evidently, this case is not something extraordinary. Just someone in a bad neighborhood. They just have a non-standard way to explain it. This person lives in another country, and I feel helpless that I cannot recommend anything to them.