That is a messy one here in the US. Almost every time we attempt to increase regulations around medical stuff we end up increasing costs and consolidation making care even more unavailable.
It’s easy to just say that the regulations should be improved. Very different to actually improve them. Therapy isn’t a mass produced engineered product like a car; if therapy was a mass produced engineered product, it would be an AI anyway. Materials science and structural engineering are far more mature and well-understood sciences than psychology, and you can’t just throw a crash test dummy into a therapist’s office and measure how damaged it gets.
It’s also not really clear how such regulations could even work. The regulations we have now are basically the obvious ones around licensure that require people to go to the right schools and whatnot. And then you can lose your license if it turns out you’ve broken the big ethical rules. But at the end of the day, that only regulates who can call themselves a “therapist” and get listed in Psychology Today. Actually “doing” “therapy” is, ultimately, built on talking to someone about your problems in some way that is supposed to help you solve them. You don’t need a “therapist” to do that. You can do it with your friend or parent or pastor or bartender or guru or “life coach” and, as long as we live in a free country, nobody’s going to stop you. Sure, the people who are allowed to call themselves therapists have certain techniques and rules that make them different, but even if that was a guarantee of quality there’s no way to stop people from talking to someone other than a licensed therapist, and it would be kind of absurd and dystopian to even try.
So let’s dispense of the notion that we are some sort of omniscient god-emperor who can just magically fix things with vague “regulations” and talk about the world as it actually exists. For a lot of people, I think that’s a world where talking about their personal issues with an LLM is arguably no worse than whatever other options they have. Maybe it’s not the equivalent of whatever amazing therapist you know or have or are or can imagine, but that’s not the therapist that everyone is going to get.
That’s why therapists have to be licensed. They decide what a “bad” therapist is, and delicense those who’ve caused significant harm to their clients - it’s a difficult process though, but it also should be. Once you get into it, you find that people have already thought of these solutions and actually put things in place to work towards a better system.
Except healthcare payments. That shit was designed to make money, not make people healthy.
“Car accidents happen regardless of what we do, so YOLO and remove safety standards” is never going to fly.