The power of digital tools to transform mental healthcare
The global burden of mental illness, both in terms of human suffering and economic loss, is catastrophic and rapidly growing. Worldwide, mental health conditions affect more than a third of the world’s population. Just two conditions alone – depression and anxiety – result in a staggering estimated $1 trillion in lost economic productivity.
When committing to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, world leaders emphasized the importance of promoting mental health and well-being worldwide. Yet three years later, the situation remains grim. Every year, 800,000 lives are lost due to suicide. In the United States alone, one in five people is living with a mental illness, and 60% of them receive no treatment. The situation is far worse in many low- and middle-income countries. Existing programmes are often underfunded or fragmented, and stigma continues to restrict individual and collective response. There is an overwhelming need for well-funded and sustained global action.
International organizations are redoubling their efforts on this issue. Forward-thinking members of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Neurotechnologies recently convened to explore the many ways that rapid advances in telecommunications, big data analytics (including machine learning), mobile technologies and biosensors – loosely grouped together under the umbrella term “digital technologies” – are poised to have a profound impact on diverse aspects of mental healthcare and treatment. Digital technologies are becoming increasingly available worldwide and will only continue to advance. Those that relate to our understanding of the brain and behaviour may have a particularly important role to play in improving mental health outcomes.
At their most basic, such interventions could include straightforward telepsychiatry applications. These can deliver care effectively in areas with a low density of mental health professionals, using “remote psychiatrist” videoconferences and low-bandwidth text/SMS services to send medication and appointment reminders, and disseminate information around mental health.
Furthermore, the small, unobtrusive sensors on our ubiquitous mobile devices can capture streaming data on aspects of patients’ physiology, behaviour and symptoms in real time. Though any implementation of policy or practice in this area must be ethically and carefully developed, it is clear that the growing volume of data generated by these devices, and our ability to collect and upload it into centralized servers, presents a tremendous opportunity.
These tools can help enable early diagnosis, track disease progression or course-of-illness data, and predict decline or relapse. This data can also provide physicians with objective information on how patients are doing between clinical visits.
