Hi friend,

I’m interested in creative ways we can use AI to improve population mental health.

AI coaching or AI therapy gets most of the attention. They have huge potential.

But they are only one application of this powerful technology. There is a large white space for other use-cases that address some of the underlying factors that lead to good mental health and a fulfilled life.

This week, I stumbled upon a very creative project in this white space. It’s all about using assistive relational intelligence to build distress tolerance and relational capacity, and I want to tell you about it.

We know healthy relationships are a strong protective factor for good mental health and a determinant of a fulfilled, satisfied life. But many societal and cultural forces are causing people to lose relationships and become increasingly isolated. While technology may contribute to this, it doesn’t have to.

If applied correctly, it might be able to bring us closer together - Slingshot’s recent study showed early signs of how this might work.

The problem is that relationships are hard. I believe a lot of our relationship challenges are born from what our Gen Z friends would call “a skill issue”. We don’t know how to recognise our own emotions, we don’t know how to regulate ourselves, we don’t know how to communicate in non-violent ways, and we don’t know how to be curious instead of combative in times of distress. These skill issues limit our ability to develop meaningful relationships.

This is the problem Jocelyn Skillman is trying to solve.

Jocelyn is a licensed therapist, clinical supervisor, educator and design ethicist. She is also the founder of Tend Messages, a product aiming to use assistive relational intelligence to reconnect us with our own nervous systems and to build capacity for human-to-human intimacy. I like that idea. So let me explain how it works and why I think it’s interesting.

Tend is a messaging platform. And while the product itself is still extremely nascent, the idea is what is interesting. Tend is designed to be used to chat with your partner, friend, sibling, whoever. It’s for times when you may be feeling something strongly (perhaps in a dysregulated way), when you don’t know what those feelings really mean or how to communicate them. We’ve all been there.

In such a moment, you can go to Tend and dump in the authentic, un-edited message that you want to tell your loved one. Tend then translates that message and sends it back to you in a way that maintains your authentic voice but reframes the message using principles of nonviolent communication (NVC).

With this message, you have a few choices. If you don’t like it, you can just delete it. If you like it but it’s not quite right, you can edit it. And then, you can send it to your loved one. The idea is that this “Tended” message would remain an authentic representation of your emotions and needs, but would be articulated in a clearer, non-violent, more curious way - one that has a better chance of improving the relationship with your loved one than the unfiltered message you wanted to send during a period of dysregulation.

Many people are using ChatGPT for editing or co-authoring use cases like this. But the messages are overly polished and disembodied. They rarely feel like an authentic representation of your emotions, and the recipient can smell that. I think using ChatGPT to edit messages may be more harmful than helpful. But by using prompts built around NVC and designed to reflect the authenticity of the user’s original message, Tend aims to be different.

At the same time, Tend also helps you understand more about your own emotional state and improve your ability to self-regulate. It shares perspectives on your feelings and needs. For example, it asks, “I wonder if you’re feeling angry? Are you feeling a need for greater control?”.

There are a lot of interesting features that could be added to a product like this. For example, Tend could provide a psychodynamic assessment of your communications with your loved one over a period of time. This could surface common themes in your relationship and provide guidance to you and your loved one on how to address those themes.

Now, inserting an AI into our relationships might be an awful idea. But if implemented thoughtfully, it might help us to develop the skills needed to have more, better relationships.

The ability to communicate our feelings is not the only skill issue that could improve population mental health. How might we improve our emotional regulation, our distress tolerance, our self-compassion, or our repair skills? If you’re building in this space, I think these are interesting questions to consider.

Jocelyn describes the goal of Tend as “using AI to build distress tolerance and relational capacity so that when you do turn to a human, you’re more resourced, more able to name what you need, more capable of repair when shit hits the fan.”

She recognises that she doesn’t know if it will work. But thoughtful, creative experimentation like this is exactly what we need more of. 

That’s all for this week. Have thoughts? Reach out and let me know. I love hearing from you.

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Keep fighting the good fight!

Steve

Founder of Hemingway


Note

[1] Tend is still in closed beta, but you can learn more about it from Jocelyn here.

[2] Jocelyn writes on Substack, and her work is worth reading. The commentary I found most insightful was her work on;

• The asymmetric weight of healing. Jocelyn describes how therapists now carry "the accumulated weight of social fracturing, vast unintegrated trauma, and the metabolic debris of a culture that has outsourced emotional labor to professional containers while dismantling the structures that once provided us vital safety and solace." The therapeutic dyad was designed as temporary scaffolding that would launch people back into mutual care, but it's become permanent because there's nowhere to return to. The asymmetry isn't just unfair to therapists; it's a symptom of broader social failure.

• The etiology of our current challenges. In the same post, Jocelyn identifies the collapse of relational infrastructure as a root cause of many of our societal mental health challenges. She outlines how atomised living severed us from extended kin networks, economic precarity keeps us churning in isolation, digital mediation offers responsiveness without embodiment, and how the loss of shared ritual has separated us from a practice that once synchronised our nervous systems collectively. Our system treats individual pathology, but for many, the real issue is systemic fracturing. No amount of clinical innovation can address the underlying erosion of