Workshop Description:
Artificial intelligence is showing up across mental health settings—in documentation platforms, accessibility tools, client-facing apps, and the larger systems our clients move through. This ethics-focused training offers space to slow down and look at AI through the lens of our shared professional values: transparency, cultural humility, client self-determination, and the centrality of human relationships.
We explore how AI can both support and complicate trauma-informed, relational, and somatic practice. The training includes real examples of clinician-facing tools, the ways clients are already bringing AI into sessions, and the broader systemic uses of AI that shape access, equity, and client experiences in healthcare, education, and social services. Touchpoints from disability justice and data ethics are woven throughout to highlight the communities most impacted by technological decisions.
Through case vignettes, guided reflection, and a structured ethical decision-making process grounded in national ethics guidelines across psychology, counseling, and social work, participants will examine when AI can ethically augment practice and when it begins to cross into territory requiring human judgment, attunement, and presence. Dedicated discussion time allows participants to connect the material to the realities of their own settings.
Learning Objectives:
1. Identify the primary ways AI is currently emerging in clinical and administrative settings across mental health professions and distinguish situations where these tools may ethically support practitioner tasks.
2. Examine potential risks of AI use within trauma-informed, relational, culturally responsive, and somatic practice, including issues related to bias, equity, and client safety.
3. Apply a structured ethical decision-making framework, grounded in national ethics guidelines across psychology, counseling, and social work, to AI-related dilemmas in documentation, direct practice, and supervision.
4. Determine practical, discipline-appropriate next steps for responsible, transparent, and ethically aligned integration of AI tools within one’s professional setting.