1. Please listen to the episode carefully before you take the quiz and do the course evaluation.

    2. Quiz: Training Therapists in the Age of AI: Preventing Deskilling and Teaching Clinical Judgment

    3. Evaluation: "Training Therapists in the Age of AI: Preventing Deskilling and Teaching Clinical Judgment" Curt Widhalm, LMFT and Katie Vernoy, LMFT
  • $9.00

Course Description

As Artificial Intelligence integrates into mental health services, clinicians face the subtle risk of professional deskilling. This course explores the competence paradox where automated outputs mask a decline in a therapist's cognitive scaffolding and clinical reasoning. We will examine how systemic pressures and insurance models incentivize efficiency over expertise, potentially eroding core skills. Participants will learn to identify algorithmic hallucinations and apply the principles of desirable difficulty to their workflow. By utilizing strategies like naked practice, therapists can ensure that AI remains a supportive tool rather than a replacement for vital clinical intuition and judgment.


Learning objectives: Participants in this course will be able to:

  1. Identify how systemic forces incentivize therapist deskilling through the use of AI

  2. Identify and mitigate the competence paradox to maintain clinical literacy

  3. Implement three strategies for learner skill retention and cognitive scaffolding


Target Audience: Supervisors and educators of prelicensed marriage and family therapists, clinical social workers, professional clinical counselors, and educational psychologists.

Instructors

Curt Widhalm

LMFT

Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is a member of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT) ethics committee, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University, lecturer in Counseling Laws and Ethics at California State University Northridge, a former Law & Ethics Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, and former CFO of CAMFT. Learn more at: www.curtwidhalm.com

Katie Vernoy

LMFT

Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, with a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from California State University, Fullerton and a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and Theater from Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. Katie’s experience spans many leadership and management roles in the mental health field since getting her license in 2005: program coordinator, director, clinical supervisor, hiring manager, recruiter, and former President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. Learn more at: www.katievernoy.com

Course Schedule

00:00 – 00:10 | Introduction and Contextualizing AI in Mental Health

  • Introduction of speakers, setting course objectives, and framing AI integration as a modern structural shift.

  • Discussion on regulatory entry points, including perspectives from the California Board of Behavioral Sciences (BBS) panel on technology.

00:10 – 00:25 | The Mechanics of Therapist Deskilling

  • Defining Deskilling as a systemic outcome driven by institutional productivity and efficiency pressures rather than individual laziness.

  • Analyzing the human drive toward efficiency and the long-term risks of bypassing core developmental stages in clinical training.

00:25 – 00:42 | The Competence Paradox and Automation Bias

  • Examination of the competence paradox: how AI generates highly polished, "therapy-flavored” documentation that masks underlying gaps in diagnostic reasoning.

  • Analyzing automation bias and the psychological tendency for newer clinicians to defer clinical authority to algorithmic outputs.

00:42 – 00:58 | Learning Science and the Value of Desirable Difficulty

  • Exploring why navigating clinical ambiguity, struggle, and messiness is empirically vital to developing a therapist's tacit knowledge.

  • Contrasting traditional, effortful learning tools (e.g., manual session transcription and clinical statement coding) with the immediate, sanitized feedback loops of AI tools.

00:58 – 01:13 | Supervision Frameworks, Manual Fallback Plans, and Ethical Accountability

  • Actionable interventions for supervisors and educators, including the implementation of naked assessments and requiring written rationales for accepting/rejecting AI suggestions.

  • Direct application to the CAMFT Code of Ethics, reinforcing that human licensees maintain 100% legal and ethical accountability for all clinical outputs.

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Continuing Education Information

CAMFT CEPA

Therapy Reimagined is approved by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists to sponsor continuing education for LMFTs, LPCCs, LCSWs, and LEPs (CAMFT CEPA provider #132270). Therapy Reimagined maintains responsibility for this program and its content. Courses meet the qualifications for the listed hours of continuing education credit for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences. We are working on additional provider approvals, but solely are able to provide CAMFT CEs at this time. Please check with your licensing body to ensure that they will accept this as an equivalent.

Course meets the qualifications for 1 hours of continuing education credit for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences.