Artificial intelligence (AI) has been deployed successfully into the health sector to enhance medicare but one area that it may find the best use is in mental illness. Though online therapy has been advocated to help in resolving the shortcomings in the traditional (face-to-face) means of caring for patients, this has not been enough.
The World Health Organization (WHO), catalogs mental disorders to include depression, bipolar affective disorder, schizophrenia, and other psychoses, dementia, intellectual disabilities, and developmental disorders including autism. These conditions showcase in diverse ways such as abnormal thoughts, perceptions, emotions, behavior, and relationships with others. Depression singularly has been found to affect more than 300 million people, the WHO has revealed.
According to Scientific American, the economic cost of depression in the US runs into hu
Technology companies have, therefore, decided to take the bull by the horns by developing ndreds of billions every year. A succinct look, will, therefore, tell us that we are dealing with a very serious situation, the more so that where we even have access to capable health care and social services which is very difficult to obtain, those suffering from mental health-related illnesses are usually reluctant in availing themselves of the treatment as a result of the perceived stigma associated with the illness.
Artificial intelligence applications for mobile phones that will serve as the first line of support for mental health patients and also provide privacy and anonymity. The essence of these applications that are targeted at individuals, is to proactively check on cases, with the view of listening and chatting in real-time, anytime, anywhere, and recommending measures that will bring succor to the users as well as improving their wellbeing.
AI is coming in to play because solutions involving versatile and assorted potentially impactful elements always come up with both a particular challenge and an opportunity to understand user engagement and factors that influence engagement. The mode of delivery of digital solutions and measures means that there is usually an ample volume of data including the user's actions, time of day taken, and the intervention components used.
Also, it's imperative to understand that there are usually multiple intervention components and this has expectedly made analyses increasingly complicated, however, this is an opportunity for practitioners to have a better grasp and a holistic understanding of user experiences which will lead to insights concerning the aspects of interventions that will lead to behavioral change on the part of the suffers.
For mental health practitioners, there are three basic ways they can deploy AI-enabled mental health applications to help out in online therapy. First, they can be used as decision-support tools for mental health practitioners, while in the second instance they are used to customize the digital patient interface with human therapist intervention for face-to-face counseling, and lastly to drive patient interaction (via remote devices) with semi-autonomous 'virtual therapists', which is also done digitally.
A lot of the applications that are currently in use are poised towards the provision of first-line assistance to human therapists this is due to the fact that rising consciousness of mental wellbeing demands greater input from health resources.
AI will ensure that online therapy becomes commonplace for people who have always found it difficult to interact initially with humans when it's integrated into their treatment, as these set of people will feel more comfortable and at home relating to a non-human therapist.
Every single AI-based system currently prototyped or deployed is in one way or the other dependent on human involvement. For this reason, the human therapist is still somewhere around the corner, maybe as an unseen but very necessary factor in the machine learning who corrects AI/ML's inclination to dispense unwittingly prejudiced administration that could be as a result of any of age, ethnicity or gender.
The role of Chatbots
We won't effectively deploy AI into online therapy without Chatbots, the reason is not far-fetched from the fact that the therapy that is being dispensed is not basically medicinal but more conversational. A chatbot is a computer application that simulates conversations with users via a chat interface, which could be in the form of a text or voice-based.
The underlying principle on which the chatbot operates can be based on a variety of foundations, ranging from a set of simple rule-based responses and keyword matching to powerful natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques; NLP involves the use of computers to comprehend and manipulate natural language, while ML revolves around self-learning computer programs with the ability to develop and conform in response to new data, without being explicitly programmed to do so.
It's obvious that the history of chatbots is closely linked with the field of psychology. If we tend to overlook the interesting philosophical and psychological questions they generate, the fact still remains that the first well-established chatbot, ELIZA was really programmed (in 1966) to mimic a Rogerian psychotherapist. This led to an improved ELIZA, the more sophisticated Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (A.L.I.C.E.), that first came into limelight in 1995.
The creation of this chatbot can be described as a revolution in that it brought about the general usage of Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML). The simplest form of a chatbot could guide the user in terms of disclosing emotions, therapy preferences, and needs.
Once the user comes forth with input, the bot can then go ahead to furnish some suggestions. This makes a good case for the possible integration of this technology into online therapy to checkmate the stigmatization and also take into cognizance the delicate nature of the mental health wellbeing.
In truism, chatbots are not yet sophisticated enough to completely take the place of a human therapist, the technology has, however, evolved to the extent that we can now go beyond one-question, one-input, one-response in conversations with chatbots.
