What Is The Role Of Artificial Intelligence In Mental Health?

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Emerging research has testified to the efficiency of artificial intelligence in mental health therapy and diagnosis.
In fact, AI can detect mental health symptoms with over 90% accuracy.

How Is AI Used In Mental Health?

The power of AI in mental health has long been used in the administration of online therapy. In recent times, AI has been included in a number of user-friendly apps to administer mental health tips and mental health care treatment.

Even multimodal digital therapy platforms or blended platforms have been developed to offer multiple modes of digital communication that hold great promise for mental health.

For instance, Google’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) attempts to engage clients in free-flowing conversations on endless topics and has the potential to mimic natural ways of communication with technology in the near future.

The Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 is an autoregressive language model used to assist people to enable peer-to-peer support services.

Can AI Detect Mental Health Symptoms?

Experts agree that technology, especially AI can improve mental health—acting as a facilitator to receive support, propel communication, and gather mental health resources. For instance, Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) have been known to provide greater accuracy in diagnosing mental health conditions and predicting patient outcomes.

Computer vision has been successfully used in imaging data analysis and understanding non-verbal cues; this technology has shown promise for addressing developmental and intellectual disorders.

Moreover, natural language processing (NLP) for speech recognition and text analysis is used in chatbot computer programs to stimulate human conversations via chatbot computer programs and create clinical documentation for complex mental health disorders.

The Future Of Artificial Intelligence In Mental Health

While AI has been known to overcome certain barriers in accessing mental health infrastructure and resources for both the practitioners and the clients—it cannot be a complete solution when it comes to mental health.

This is because human-to-human interaction is key in therapy sessions that help people with mental health conditions recognize, rectify, and re-orient their problematic thoughts and behavior patterns.

How AI can help people with mental wellness remains a matter of research. AI is unlikely to fully replace traditional therapy in the near future.

However, its potential for mental healthcare is enormous. As one Bangalore-based psychologist, Gayatri Sen, remarked: “AI can facilitate diagnosing symptoms and connecting to available resources, but when it comes to seeking help one needs to really reach out to a clinician.”