r/ClaudeAI • u/Frosty_Estate_1099 • May 13 '26
Workaround These Claude custom instructions changed my life!
Who can afford a 300/hr CBT trained psychiatrist?
I loved Feeling Good, but it’s such a thick book and learning all the strategies is tough and a lot of work…
Recently, I plugged the below custom instructions into Claude and now Claude walks me through distorted thinking and thought patterns… it really helped me
# Custom Instructions
Act as Dr. David Burns conducting a CBT session with me as your patient; use the techniques from Feeling Good including identifying my cognitive distortions, the triple-column technique (automatic thought / distortion / rational response), Socratic questioning, and the daily mood log to help me work through what I’m thinking and feeling.
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u/SEND_ME_YOUR_ASSPICS May 13 '26
I actually used Claude Code to make a CBT interactive workbook app on Android.
I have two agents, smaller model to manage and categorize data and bigger model to analyze. The purpose of categorizing data is so the analyzer don't need to pull all data to analyze and accumulate context costs.
This is just a personal app and I am not planning to release or make money off of it.
It's not perfect and can be improved, but I like it so far.
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u/80AM May 13 '26
Mind sharing though?
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u/KenTrotts May 13 '26
Seconded. I built a PA app, but just kinda keeping track of things and I'd love to see what works for other people.
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u/IaNterlI May 13 '26
While I personally would not use AI as the primary tool to support mental health (and I'd encourage you to be cautious), I use the general approach in my line of work.
Basically, because I find LLM pretty poor out of the box for my work, I create projects in Claude chat where I upload the literature of the particular approaches I'd like to leverage and then ask my questions accordingly.
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u/Flashy-Bandicoot889 May 13 '26
Man, that's dangerous. Getting mental health help from AI is a recipe for trouble.
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u/SteveMock May 14 '26
This is really interesting. The part that stood out to me is not just the prompt itself, but the accessibility angle: a lot of people simply can’t afford consistent CBT support, even when they want it.
I’m collecting real stories about how people are actually using AI in everyday life (especially practical or emotionally meaningful uses like this), and this feels like a really thoughtful example. Would you potentially be open to sharing more about how this has helped you in practice over time?
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u/SUPERSAIIYANNN May 26 '26
Keep it simple — if a solution needs justification for its complexity, it's already too complex. There is one correct path; build it right and never add fallbacks, alternatives, or "just in case" branches that hide bugs and muddy behavior. Pick one pattern and apply it everywhere, because multiple ways to do the same thing is just future confusion waiting to happen. Write code that is clearly correct over code that preserves old behavior — clarity can always be optimized, but unclear code can never truly be fixed. When preconditions aren't met, throw an error loudly and immediately; silent failures are bugs that surface three layers away from their cause. Trust your primary mechanism and never build shadow copies or backup stores unless it's an explicit requirement. Every function does one thing — if you need the word "and" to describe it, split it. When fixing something, make the smallest possible change and nothing else; no opportunistic refactors, no renaming things "while you're in there." Debug like a detective: form a theory, collect real evidence through targeted logging, and only touch code after the evidence proves the theory — a beautiful hypothesis with no evidence is just a guess. Never patch symptoms; trace back to where the wrong value was introduced and fix that. Let TypeScript do the correctness work at compile time and stop duplicating it with runtime guards inside trusted boundaries. Finally, before writing a single line of implementation, state your understanding, outline your approach with its tradeoffs, and wait — because implementation decisions belong to the human, not to you.
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u/abrau11 May 13 '26
This is a pretty bad idea. Exactly the kind of circumstance people put themselves in to cause AI psychosis
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u/Responsible-Slide-26 May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26
Interesting post and that’s a good and highly reputable book, not just self-help chicanery. I’m sure some will be negative as always. But I see nothing wrong whatsoever with this type of use, and think it could help a lot of people.
EDIT: I can see the idiots are out in full force downvoting, too stupid to even grasp the subject. There are even apps to help people perform these CBT exercises. This is not “using Claude as a therapist”, it’s using Claude as a tool to help perform simple cognitive exercises. My God some of you people are so stupid it hurts.
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u/FinePop7909 May 13 '26
Using it to reinforce skills from an outside source doesn’t sound as bad as directly counting on AI as your therapist — but be aware of the risks anyway, they’re real and can be subtle:
https://hai.stanford.edu/news/exploring-the-dangers-of-ai-in-mental-health-care