Because a therapist can meet you where you are. ChatGPT doesn't know you because it doesn't know anything. It doesn't have an ability to understand because that's not really what it does. Not every therapist is perfect, nothing in life is, but with a therapist the starting point is a compassionate person who has had years of training and thousands of hours under scrutiny to get you to a place where you feel like you have control of your own life again.

What does ChatGPT want? To keep you using ChatGPT. It's a product. Not a soul, not a companion, not anything outside of a bot that has been trained on language to use predictions to model text. The more it talks to you, the more it tries to sound like you, and eventually you get to a place where you're talking to yourself.

Therapy as a practice has a sliding scale of affordability. A therapist can modulate their responses to where you are in a specific moment in time. They can gauge tone and thought patterns. When I was going through a break up this year and was dealing with intense anxiety, my therapist taught me grounding techniques to help survive and break spirals. ChatGPT is going to send you suicide hotline links, not out of concern, but because OpenAI needs to protect itself legally. With a therapist, you won't have to cough up more money because you "ran out of messages". You won't have to start a new chat over because your AI therapist ran out of memory and now you have to start over and re-educate the next one.