Overdiagnosis and AI Therapists | Allen Frances | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #55

Mental disorder diagnosis has increased rapidly in recent decades, and now with the introduction of AI, possibilities for treatment are changing. Where will AI assistants fit into psychiatry and clinical psychology? Allen Frances, born 1942 in New York City, is Professor and Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine. He trained at Columbia (BA), SUNY Downstate (MD), the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training. He chaired Duke's Department of Psychiatry from 1991 and previously spent two decades at Cornell, where he ran the outpatient department and founded a brief therapy program.He is best known for chairing the DSM-IV Task Force (DSM-IV, 1994; text revision, 2000) and, before that, for writing the personality disorders section of DSM-III under Robert Spitzer. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Personality Disorders and the Journal of Psychiatric Practice.His key publications include Saving Normal (2013), the international bestseller and his manifesto against diagnostic inflation; Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis (2013); and Twilight of American Sanity (2017). His August 2025 British Journal of Psychiatry editorial, "Warning: AI chatbots will soon dominate psychotherapy," is his most cited recent work, and he writes a weekly Psychiatric Times series on AI in mental health.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.