How AI Is Changing Mental Health Care, with Stevie Chancellor

AI systems are really good at identifying those places where you want validation and support, because they are really agreeable. But sometimes you need pushback and sometimes you need someone to hold you up and say like, "Well, is this actually true?" Hello, everybody. Welcome back to "Radio Headspace." As a mental health professional, a lot of people have started to contact me about using AI as a therapist. So I tried it myself, and I have to say, I was actually really impressed. But it raised a bunch of questions for me, like, is this actually a replacement for therapy? Is it good we've removed the human from the situation? And where is this all heading? So I brought on Dr. Stevie Chancellor to break it all down. Stevie and her team at the University of Minnesota are at the forefront of this conversation. This is a really great discussion that breaks down how AI can be used as a supplement to traditional forms of therapy. And her thoughts on this were very surprising. Hey, everybody, welcome back to "Radio Headspace." I am so excited to be joined by Stevie Chancellor today. I've been wanting to have this conversation for a little while now, and I'm so happy that you're joining us today. Thanks for inviting me. I'm so excited to talk about mental health, social media... Everything. It's a whole thing right now. I mean, it really is. So before we get into today's topic, for the people that don't follow conversations like this normally, like, what is it that you do? Like, give us a little background on who you are and what you do and what your passion is at the moment. So I'm a researcher. I'm a computer scientist who works at the University of Minnesota, and I try and make AI systems for mental health better for everybody. If you could tell us, kind of where are we in terms of AI and mental health? Like what are the capabilities and what have been your findings? So before I jump into talking about the specific findings of my work, it might be valuable for us to quickly look at what AI can do for mental health. Yes. Because the term AI is, like, a really big concept that has a lot of ways we can make that technology work for us. So in mental health, we can have AI be able to analyze data sources to infer if someone may be experiencing a mood disorder. For example, we can use their electronic health records in collaboration with hospitals and clinics to infer if somebody may be suffering from major depressive disorder. We can also use AI differently to know if somebody is engaging in behaviors that might suggest they are doing something dangerous, like they have a crisis and they need assistance immediately. So one of those is built on historical data. One of them is built on things that people are actively doing right now....