Can AI Assist in Diagnosing Mental Health Disorders?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used across a range of different sectors, allowing professionals to improve operations and services and bring new levels of innovation to a variety of industries.

But it’s not just about developing self-driving cars and having programmes that can create computer-generated articles. AI has been and is being used to contribute to advancements in medicine, from being used as a tool for research, organisation and administration to diagnostics.

Diagnostics and Disease Detection Using AI

Doctors and medical practitioners rely heavily on lab testing, analysis and results, and in some cases, it can be both difficult and time-consuming to properly labs and other tests as they end up equating to big data. That is, data sets that are so large that they can take incredibly long to analyse and understand.

Artificial intelligence programmes have the potential to be able to properly deal with data like this, potentially detecting things that doctors and analysts may not have time to figure out and even things that they might miss due to human error.

There are several specific areas of medicine that AI is being used to help progress, one of which is the early detection of breast cancer, but more recently, medical researchers and programmers have be working together to create software that can be used as a tool to contribute to diagnosing mental health disorders.

How Can AI Contribute to Diagnosing Mental Health Issues?

In terms of traditional, “standard” forms of medicine, mental health disorders can be very difficult to diagnose definitively even in the more straightforward of scenarios. While, in some cases, certain hormones or other irregularities may indicate mental health issues, most of the time it comes down to making judgements on individual cases.

Often, mental health diagnoses are achieved by means of evaluating behaviour in conjunction with certain biological features, like heart rate and breathing patterns, for instance.

While diagnosing mental health disorders isn’t nearly as objective as diagnosing other types of diseases, modern AI programmes have been created and designed in such a way that they’re able to handle mountains of data of different sorts in ways that seem far more advanced than what humans would be able to do manually – a certainly quicker.

In addition to being able to analyse big data, AI technology has the potential to be able to make sense of complex relationships between human behaviour and physiological symptoms, identifying patterns that may possibly lead to increased diagnoses and the generation of more knowledge in the world of mental health.

Not only does AI have the potential ability to diagnose mental health disorders, researchers are also attempting to use in predictive analytics. That is, to evaluate patients and hopefully pick up minor symptoms that could lead to mental health issues in the future – things that would probably not have been identified so early by doctors.

According to an article published by A. Abd-Alrazaq et al. in the NPJ Medicine 5 Journal in 2022, it’s plausible to expect that the use of AI in the field of mental health will extend beyond mere diagnostics and into treatment too.

In fact, in some ways, it already has, with research already being conducted into coming up with personalised therapeutic treatments for patients suffering from mental disorders by means of AI programmes and even some kinds of robotic technology.

The Potential Use of AI in Mental Health

While it’s hard to say exactly what the future holds for AI in the world of mental health, the technology has already been used to make strides in diagnostics and even the development of potential treatments.

However, mental health disorders require sensitivity on behalf of practitioners – in fact, a great deal of medical training in mental health is all about how to properly deal with patients in a way that is helpful, tactful and empathetic. And, while AI has progressed significantly over the years and certainly will continue to do so in the years to come, software and computer programmes just aren’t the same as real humans.

Indeed, it seems most likely that the future of AI in the world of mental health will be as a diagnostic and treatment tool that will be used by doctors and other medical practitioners to improve their current efforts, from research and predictive analytics to treatment programmes.