Ethics in the Age of AI: How Dayna Guido is Helping Mental Health Professionals Stay Human
By all accounts, ethics training in mental health isn’t exactly the place you go for originality. It’s often delivered in the same dry, checkbox format that many clinicians sleepwalk through every few years to meet continuing ed requirements. But Dayna Guido is reshaping the field quietly, creatively, and with a kind of deep authority that comes only from forty years in the work.
A clinical social worker, author, educator, and ethics consultant, Dayna doesn’t lecture so much as she invites. Her signature training, built around storytelling, experiential methods, and sometimes even mask making, aren’t just about ethics. They’re about remembering why the work mattered in the first place.
Now, as AI begins to creep into everything from therapy documentation to client consent, Guido is expanding her mission: to help clinicians navigate these technological shifts without losing the essence of what it means to be a trusted professional.
The Therapist Meets the Tech
Across the country, AI is already reshaping therapy behind the scenes. In California, over half of all therapy sessions are virtual. Some clinicians are using AI to generate session notes. Others are automating consent forms or storing client data in the cloud.
These changes might seem subtle until you’re the one explaining a breach of HIPAA to a licensing board, or trying to justify a decision made with the help of an algorithm. Guido sees the danger in that distance.
“The problem isn’t just the tech,” she says. “It’s that we’re not being taught how to think about the tech ethically.”
That’s where her work comes in. Guido’s workshops don’t hand out pre-written rules. Instead, they ask the questions that matter most: What happens to client trust when a session is recorded for AI use? Who owns therapeutic data? What does informed consent really look like now?
She believes ethics isn’t just about compliance. It’s about connection. And AI, in the wrong hands, threatens to sever that.
Training That Feels Like Real Life
Dayna Guido’s approach is anything but theoretical. Her training exercises include fairy tale inspired scenarios, clinical storytelling, even physical activities that help therapists tune into their own somatic cues during moments of ethical uncertainty.
“There’s a difference between knowing the right answer and being able to feel when something’s wrong,” she says.
Her programs Ethical Courage: Accessing Your Ethical Super Powers; Ethics on a Cloudy Day, and Writing Your Ethical Eulogy aren’t just clever titles. They’re immersive, participatory experiences that give clinicians something far more powerful than a CEU certificate: confidence.
She also speaks to a wide range of professionals, from graduate students anxious about documentation errors to senior organizational leaders worried about PR disasters and staff burnout. Each group gets something tailored, practical, and actually memorable.
The Heart of the Brand: Humanity
Guido isn’t trying to disrupt mental health education. She’s trying to humanize it. Her voice, both in person and in writing, is calm and grounded. She uses humor generously, even when the topic is weighty. Her message is simple: You can love this work, adapt to change, and still stay ethical without burning out or selling out.
For organizations, she offers institutional training that helps safeguard reputation and build staff resilience. For clinicians, she provides clarity amid complexity. For emerging professionals, she offers a kind of mentorship, accessible, unpretentious, and needed more than ever in a field growing more complicated by the week.
Why She’s the One to Watch
Guido stands out in a landscape filled with dense textbooks and webinar overload. Unlike the big training companies or ethics committees bogged down in bureaucracy, she’s hands on, heart forward, and tuned into the current moment.
Where others see ethics as compliance, she sees it as craft. Where others warn clinicians to be careful, she reminds them to be courageous. And where most see AI as a threat, she sees an opportunity to build something new without letting go of what matters most.
Want to experience her work?
Her next webinar series, Ethics in the New Era, explores how to integrate AI into practice responsibly, protect client trust, and stay grounded in human connection.
Because in a world of fast moving tech and blurred ethical lines, it helps to have someone like Dayna Guido in your corner.
