Alex: A computer aid for treating alexithymia

Abstract

One of the principal skills that a patient in psychotherapy must acquire is to be aware of and be able to express his or her feelings and emotions. Many patients, however, especially at the beginning of their therapy, have a great deal of trouble doing this. They are able to articulate “I feel bad” but nothing more precise. One reason for this is that they may be suffering from a cognitive-affective disorder called alexithymia.†This paper describes a system called Alex that we have built to help treat alexithymia. This system, currently a prototype, consists of a query processor, a pattern matcher, and a text generator written in C++.1