This report appeared last week:
Can tech tackle the global crisis of depression and anxiety?
Quite possibly. A new WHO report sets out the scale of the need
DURING the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020, as China imposed strict controls on the movement of its citizens, technology became the main means of tackling anxiety and depression. Smartphones provided crucial support to locked-down Chinese citizens, from counselling through chat services to online self-help. WeChat, Weibo and TikTok, the country’s giant social networks, swung into action, offering mental-health education and services.
More intriguingly, artificial-intelligence (AI) was also put to use. Weibo messages were scanned to find individuals at risk of suicide, and volunteers were alerted to intervene. Using AI to scour social media for signs of mental illness raises obvious privacy questions. But overall, China made impressive use of technology to manage the diagnosis and treatment of depression, anxiety and stress.
Interest in mental-health tech had been growing even before the pandemic. Today, between 10,000 and 20,000 such apps are available for download. Their quality is questionable, and the dangers of bias in algorithms are well known. The risks to privacy, and not just in China, are serious. Still, America’s National Institutes of Health reckons tech has opened a “new frontier” in mental-health support. Robots seem certain to play an important role in assessing and treating mental-health conditions.
There is a huge global unmet need for care, as the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) World Mental Health Report, published on June 17th, makes clear. The review, the largest of its kind in 20 years, paints a sorry picture. In 2019 1bn people were living with a mental-health disorder, the most common of which were anxiety and depression. The pandemic, economic downturn and social polarisation have made matters worse. In the first year of covid, the prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by 25% worldwide. In Britain annual spending on antidepressants rose by 66% during the pandemic.
Yet, according to the WHO, on average governments allocate just 2% of their health budgets to mental-health treatment and prevention. Even if they could find more money, they would run up against a desperate global scarcity of health-care staff. Mental-health nurses, psychiatric social workers, psychologists and counsellors are all in short supply. Half the world’s population lives in a country where there is less than one psychiatrist for every 200,000 people. Regular doctors and nurses are often not trained to recognise patients with mental-health conditions.
Moe here:
Sadly, as noted in the last paragraph, there are a range of ethical issues.
“And thorny ethical questions abound. AI might diagnose people online without their permission; few will want to be told that an algorithm has concluded that they have depression. If an algorithm decides someone might kill themselves, what should be done? Such technology could be misused in the 20 countries in which suicide is still criminalised, as online tools can often pick up intent. (While your correspondent was researching this article, Google replied to her search queries on suicide with the telephone number of the Samaritans.) Powerful tools bring mighty responsibilities. But the benefits to humanity of using tech to tackle mental-health problems could be enormous.”
The bottom line is that e-mental services can and have been shown to work and are needed but we need to realise there are potential downsides and difficulties with all therapeutic modalities.
I look forward to progress with both the need of such therapies and the wrinkles!
David.
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