What do you see when you picture a tree?¹
Maybe you see branches reaching toward the sky. But what about the roots? When Stanford researcher Nava Haghighi asked ChatGPT to generate an image of a tree, it gave her branches and trunk — no roots. She tried again, mentioning she's from Iran. The AI returned a tree in a desert with stereotypical patterns — still no roots. Only when she typed "everything in the world is connected" did roots finally appear.
This isn't just about pictures. It reveals something deeper about how AI "thinks" and why that matters for mental health apps.
The Hidden Framework Problem
Every AI, like every person, operates from a basic worldview. Philosophers call this "ontology," which is just a fancy word for "what you believe exists and what matters." The Stanford study found that when popular chatbots were asked "What is a human?", every single one defined humans as individual biological beings. Not one mentioned that humans might be connected beings within relationships and communities — even though many cultures around the world see things that way.
Here's the problem: most mental health chatbots are built on this same limited worldview. They treat your mind as an isolated computer that needs its "bugs" fixed. So they offer structured interventions: breathing exercises, thought reframes, journaling prompts, CBT worksheets. And here's the thing: these techniques can work. Breathing exercises genuinely calm your nervous system. Cognitive reframes can shift your perspective. These aren't bad tools.
But for many people, the effects don't last. A week later, you're back where you started. Why? Because these interventions are designed around symptoms and applied the same way to everyone. They're structured, logical, and if we're honest, they can feel superficially applied, like a band-aid on something deeper. The chatbot doesn't know "you." It knows anxiety in general, stress in general. It matches your symptoms to a technique and delivers it. That's useful, but it's incomplete.
What Depth Psychology Understands
Depth psychology, the tradition started by Freud and Jung, takes a different approach. It doesn't just look at your symptoms. It asks: What's underneath? What patterns or programs are running in the background that you don't even notice?
Think of it like an iceberg. Regular chatbots work on the tip, the visible part. They see your anxiety or stress and offer an exercise. Depth psychology goes deeper. It explores the hidden 90%: the assumptions, relationships, and stories that actually drive how you feel and act.
This matters because your problems usually aren't what they appear to be on the surface. The Stanford researchers put it perfectly: current AI risks "constraining human imagination for generations to come" by treating one narrow view of humans as the only truth.
A Different Kind of AI: The Sensing Layer
At iVASA, we're building something different. Instead of treating you as a machine to be optimized, we designed an AI that understands you exist within webs of meaning: your relationships, your history, your unique way of making sense of the world.
The key is what we call the sensing layer. Before iVASA offers any intervention, it listens, really listens, to what's happening beneath your words. It tracks patterns over time: the contradictions you keep returning to, the stories you tell yourself, the ways your intentions and behaviors don't quite match up. This isn't about diagnosing you or slotting you into a category. It's about understanding you specifically, in all your complexity.
Only then does iVASA respond, not with a generic technique, but with insight that actually fits where you are. Sometimes that might include a breathing exercise or a CBT-style reframe. But it comes from a place of genuine understanding, not symptom-matching. That's the difference between advice that fades in a week and insight that changes how you see yourself.
We don't just ask "what are your symptoms?" We explore the deeper question: "What does this experience mean for you?" Because real change doesn't come from better tips. It comes from understanding yourself more fully, including the parts you can't see yet.
The Stanford researchers suggest we need AI that helps "expand our imagination of what it means to be human." That's exactly what depth-informed therapy does — and what iVASA aims to bring to everyone.
Because (and picture this too): You are probably not a tree without roots.
1. https://hai.stanford.edu/news/when-ai-imagines-a-tree-how-your-chatbots-worldview-shapes-your-thinking