I woke up from a deeply disturbing dream. Once-in-a-decade intensity. The kind that leaves you rattled for hours.

I volunteer with the Samaritans. I know the service exists for exactly this - when you’re troubled and need to talk. I know the volunteers are trained to listen without judgement. I’ve been that volunteer.

I didn’t call.

It wasn’t that I forgot the service existed. I actively considered it. And then I thought: I know the kinds of people who are desperate to get through. I’m not sure I want to put myself in the queue.

So I talked to an LLM instead.

The Calculus

With the Samaritans, there’s a threshold to cross. You’re talking to a stranger. There’s a queue. There’s an implicit question of whether you “qualify” - whether your problem is serious enough to warrant taking up a slot someone else might need.

The training addresses this. We tell callers explicitly that they don’t need to be in crisis. If something’s troubling you, that’s enough. But the implicit filter still operates. People class themselves out before they ever dial.

I did it myself, and I’m a volunteer.

With the LLM, I had no such hesitation.

Dry Runs

There’s something to the facelessness. No human on the other end to judge, no social contract to navigate. You can say the thing you wouldn’t say to anyone else, see how it sounds, decide what you actually think.

A dry run with a simulacrum.

By the time I finished, the dream hadn’t resolved itself. I didn’t have answers. But I’d proven to myself that I could talk about it. The frontal lobes had been let into the frame. Something had shifted, even if I couldn’t name it.

I think I’d be more inclined now to ring and talk to someone - having warmed up the muscle, broken the ice on the subject, even if it wasn’t with a person.

And to be clear: I talked to an LLM instead of doing nothing. Not instead of ringing. I wasn’t going to ring. I was troubled, but I could feel it was temporary - not a crisis, not at risk of spiralling.

If there’s any doubt, ring.

The Uncorking

Here’s the thought that stayed with me:

People who would never get therapy, who would never call a helpline, who would never burden a friend with something half-formed and strange - they might process it anyway now. The barrier drops low enough that they step over it.

Maybe this is like radiology. When machine learning caught up to medical imaging, we expected radiologists to disappear. Instead, demand increased. The technology made it feasible to scan things we wouldn’t have bothered scanning before.

Maybe more people will seek help than ever. Not fewer people giving help, but more people able to receive it - because the barrier finally got low enough.

I don’t know if that’s right. I know I talked about something I wouldn’t have talked about otherwise. That feels like something.