I appreciate your point about personal responsibility for AI output and viewing it as a tool. However, I’m not sure how other things being bad for the environment too negates AI being bad for the environment. How does the level of outrage around an issue correlate to the factual severity of it? Also, AI is bad for the environment and it’s pretty clear

Unlike AI, Bitcoin wasn’t being so rabidly adopted and the (US) government wasn’t issuing EOs to prevent regulation.

If a professional is required by law to make these reports, and makes you aware of these duties at the start of your care, then there is no valid ethics complaint and no violation of trust. The therapist must tell you in their informed consent about these limits to confidentiality and should have done so before any personal information was disclosed to them.

While there is a potential of some harm due to this disclosure, therapists are not in a position to investigate and determine if abuse / credible threats of violence occurred and are explicitly not supposed to do so. They are supposed to make a report and allow other state agencies to investigate. If OPs family ended up hurting someone and the therapist was drawn into legal proceedings, they could equally be sued for having this information and not following their duty to warn.

OP, these issues do belong in therapy and you should be able to get support for them.

This was a very brief explanation of many studies looking into this exact problem. The conclusion is from their research, not mine. You’re also making my point, that expressions of joy, happiness etc vary between cultures. This article talks about some of the research but I recommend reading the original studies or Barrett’s book.

Article

We actually don’t have the same emotional expressions. The early studies on “universal” emotional expressions (joy, disgust etc) were extremely biased. The researches paid western actors to make facial expressions, took pictures of those expressions, then showed those pictures to various uncontacted / low contact tribes. However, the researches tended to ask the tribes what expression they saw repeatedly until they gave the answer the researches expected.

Even smiling isn’t universal. Think about cultural differences between smiling even in modern day Russia. There’s evidence that smiling might have been an expression of joy but was deemed socially inappropriate in Ancient Rome.

Emotional expressions in the brain differ between individuals and even differ within the same individual on separate occasions of the “same” emotion. Lisa Barrett has an excellent book on this topic: How Emotions are Made.

You could consider getting a psychological assessment that will give you an idea of your cognitive strengths and weaknesses. They can also administer instruments like the Strong Interest Inventory if you’re still looking for help deciding on a career.