Can Artificial Intelligence improve your mental health?
You know that political unrest and brutality towards humanity have spread through India like wildfire and gone international in conjunction with the fact that we are in a global pandemic and the fact that we are headed towards an economic recession. This has understandably had a negative impact on many people’s mental health, leaving a lot of people looking for ways to either maintain or improve their mental health. Research shows that increased media exposure to collective crises like pandemics for large-scale political unrest causes both psychological and physiological stress. Although you are stressed out from the current moment, you have a history of mental health concerns, or are looking for new options for self-care, I thought it would be interesting to talk about how Artificial Intelligence algorithms are being used to diagnose and treat mental health concerns at all levels of severity, as well as talk about how AI might help you manage stress in your life.
If we look at all the medical fields that have begun to adopt Artificial Intelligence algorithms into their practice, mental health and psychiatry are probably at the bottom of that list in terms of progress and it makes sense if you think about it. Unlike in physical medicine where a lot of the things that we can measure are much more quantitative, whereas a lot of mental health relies on qualitative variables. Additionally how we describe them depends on both how the patient chooses to describe their feelings as well as how the provider interprets them. For example, someone experiencing depression may not describe themselves as feeling sad but is feeling unenergetic or unmotivated in some cases. We do have a quantitative diagnostic tool like imaging but those are always conclusive. If we don’t have a gold standard for diagnostics for in AI terms of our data doesn’t necessarily have a label, how can we apply Artificial Intelligence to solve this problem.
It turns out that researchers showed that AI algorithms might still be useful in diagnosing conditions, predicting treatment responses, and as a supplement to ongoing mental treatment plants. Starting with diagnostics, there have been several studies that have looked to apply AI to the challenge of diagnosing anything from depression to schizophrenia, ADHD. Depression tends to be the most popular disorder to approach. Some studies focus on social media information using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to extract emotions from the text. In fact, a study from Harvard and the University of Vermont successfully analyzed Instagram photos of just over 150 people to identify markers of depression with similar accuracies to health care professionals. Other approaches have been more focused on brain imaging, as there are some mental health conditions that have neural signatures.
