Our Tower of Babel and the Future of Psychiatric Clinicians

PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

Last night, my wife and I heard our Rabbi son speak at Flagler College in St. Augustine, a Christian-oriented school desiring increased Judaic education. St. Augustine is the oldest European settlement in America and the home of explorer Ponce de Leon, who sought the Fountain of Youth—a quest for immortality that we are still pursuing.

This presentation was the annual Cecile & Gene Usdin Judeo-Christian Lecture Series. In a serendipity, psychiatrist Gene L. Usdin, MD, was so important to my wife and me. He was a renowned social psychiatrist mentor who asked me to lead the American Association for Social Psychiatry back at the turn of the new millennium when it was threatening to disband. Now, it is thriving.

The timing of the lecture was close to when the Tower of Babel was being discussed in our weekly Torah (Old Testament) study. One major discussion consideration was whether the people were scattered across the globe because of their hubris in trying to act like God in building a tower to the sky.

Now we may be facing a similar challenge with artificial intelligence (AI). Are we embracing hubris in creating a technology that is quickly trending to be smarter than us in many ways, a God-like technical tower if you will? AI is very successful in quickly pulling together digital data, but in the process can occasionally produce wrong conclusions in what are called AI “hallucinations.” Like human hallucinations, these are symptoms of malfunction.

At this same time as AI’s rapid development, we clinicians are being subjected to major mental health undue stress, including epidemic rates of burnout, rising moral injuries, and increasing collegiate conflict over political divisiveness and who is at fault.

In the early part of my career, our own stress and countertransference vulnerabilities were expected to be addressed by starting our own psychotherapy with an experienced and wise clinician. However, that expectation has dissipated with psychiatry becoming more and more biological, consistent with data analysis, not subjective speculation.

And where are clinicians starting to trend in attending to themselves? Not toward other clinicians, but to AI, as today’s Washington Post article stated in “AI for therapy? Some therapists are fine with it - and use it themselves.”¹

The results of this shift in clinical mental well-being are yet to be analyzed. It does exemplify a return to the personal therapy of clinicians, but with AI instead of a real-life person. Will this tower of technology break down as the Tower of Babel did? That, for now, is up to us.

I imagine Gene would be pleased with his hometown—a childhood hometown once upon a time not particularly welcome to Jews—ongoing annual lecture series and the continuing exploration for productive interfaith relationships and social psychiatry perspectives. He left a legacy that is worth trying to emulate.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.

Reference

1. Wu D. AI for therapy? Some therapists are fine with it - and use it themselves. Washington Post. November 6, 2025. Accessed November 6, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/11/06/therapists-ai-mental-health/