Artificial Intelligence to Facilitate Better Mental Health

This could prove to be a game changer when it comes to suicide prevention as timely intervention and support may help buy time and take the patient’s mind off the decision to kill himself or herself.

While the traditional practice in mental health, alongside the observations of mental health professionals, requires the individual to observe and self-report indicative changes; AI-based mechanisms can help diagnose the problem early by noticing mood shifts, speech patterns, linguistic cues etc.

It can also be used to analyse social media interactions and detect the status of users’ mental health. For example, researchers from the World Well Being Project analysed social media using AI and found out that “those suffering from depression express themselves on social media in ways that those dealing with other chronic conditions do not such as mentions of loneliness and using words such as "feelings," "I" and "me." Depression-associated language markers, facial expressions, tone of their interactions could help foretell onset of depression up to three months before the person received a formal diagnosis.

Better and quick access to mental health care without having to compromise on one’s privacy is also one of the primary advantages of harnessing the power of AI in this space. Stigma related to mental illnesses deters patients from speaking up and seeking help. Further, some patients, due to fear of being judged, may feel hesitant to discuss their situation with other individuals, including trained professionals. This leads to more pent-up emotions and worsening of the person's situation in the long run. In such a scenario, AI is not only perceived as a non-opinionated, non-judgmental, and a neutral listener, but one can also have himself or herself heard within one’s own privacy and comfort zone.

Last but not the least, AI-powered apps can be used to track a person’s lifestyle and keep him or her motivated to follow practices such as yoga, meditation, solving puzzles etc. either to prevent mental health crisis or improve his or her situation in case it has already set in. Voiced mental health assistants can provide a hyper-personalized experience to inform people about changes that their bodies undergo during stress and guide them towards better mental health practices.

The Way Ahead

With smartphones getting ubiquitous, focus on development of AI and initiatives like Digital India, quick 24X7 access, accuracy of data generated, and low cost of implementation, AI can help create affordable mental healthcare solutions in India. Though, lack of human contact is often cited as one of its drawbacks, yet, it is an effective tool to improve the quality and access of mental healthcare services in India. To ensure its efficacy further and identify the possible loopholes in its implementation, it is important to study the full impact AI can have on treating people with mental disorders by testing it on a large population of people from different demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds.

Some more interesting use case of AI in mental health

• Collaboration and Chat applications by counselling services by emotionally get in touch with patients and understand their pain areas and do behaviour analysis by keywords they use to search on mobile using internet.

• Parental control tracker with AI based logics which help children to improve their mental health and get them free from virtual world look for signs of cyberbullying, depression, suicidal thoughts and sexting on a child’s phone.

• AI helps in support during mental health crisis , alerting based on their frustration levels and Bp levels with alerts configured to their care takers

• Awareness and education of mental health which is a daily basic dose based on thoughts, age , user behaviour analysis

• Meditation with relief based to relax their mind