The Role of AI in Transforming the Mental Health Industry

A new generation of AI tools is changing the mental health industry — but before you start dreaming of (or dreading) your upcoming visit to your friendly robot AI therapist, it’s worth taking a look at exactly what is and isn’t changing.

Will AI Replace Human Mental Health Professionals?

The short answer is no.

There’s no such thing as AI therapists and psychiatrists that are capable of making diagnoses, writing prescriptions, and independently solving mental health problems. And there’s no real roadmap showing how we would get to that level of AI development.

The real problem in mental health is a shortage of practitioners, both mental health professionals and substance use counselors.

In other words: there’s more mental health work to do than there are trained professionals to do it.

And that’s where AI has a role to play: easing that shortage and lightening workloads.

In a wide-ranging report, Axios showed that AI tools including mental health chatbot Wysa and FDA-approved apps are already helping:

• Analyzing patient conversations with practitioners to look for patterns

• Analyzing text messages between patients and doctors to do the same

• Using predictive modeling to identify risk of opioid addiction and detect depression

We’re also seeing promise that AI systems could soon help to design new drugs by approaching the testing process with a speed and approach humans can’t match.

One Worrying Exception

AI isn’t going to replace human professionals in this field — at least not officially. However, one development has some experts worried: some users are adopting conversational AI tools as “armchair therapists” — even though companies like OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) expressly state their products should not be used in this way.

So there isn’t exactly a threat to jobs here. But there is a risk that some people who need real mental health treatment will turn to friendly-sounding bots that aren’t qualified to give advice or treatment.

The Importance of Training Mental Health Practitioners in AI Integration

As more and more AI-powered tools get approved by the FDA (and as consumers grow more comfortable using them), mental health practitioners must adapt.

It’s a question of when, not if, patients will experiment with these tools, so mental health practitioners must be aware of the products that are out there.

Practitioners need to understand the beneficial tools so they can guide their patients in using them properly, and they also need to stay aware of non-approved or unhelpful uses of tools so they can intervene if a patient is using these tools in a dangerous way.

How AI Could Contribute to a More Comprehensive Mental Health System

AI tools can help practitioners and healthcare systems move toward a more thorough, more efficient, more comprehensive approach. Nothing compares to a human’s ability to read subtle emotional cues, but humans have significant “processing power” limits.

In contrast, AI-powered systems can analyze text, audio, and video exponentially faster. These tools could be used to screen for certain issues, triage care, or alert practitioners about risk.

By streamlining the human work of mental health professionals, AI frees them up to focus on those eminently human tasks and processes. AI also helps to address the care shortage by empowering those in mental healthcare to serve more patients, offer a higher level of care, or both.