Questão 15 - FCMMG 2025

        Artificial intelligence is set to transform mental health services

      Seithikurippu R. Pandi-Perumal, Meera Narasimhan, Mary V. Seeman and Haitham Jahrami

 

¹ In the aftermath of the global COVID-19 crisis, the need for mental health services has risen sharply throughout the world. This surge has resulted in most jurisdictions having insufficient mental health resources to address the increased demand. Consequently, many mental illnesses go undiagnosed or receive inaccurate diagnoses. When untreated or undertreated, these dysfunctions worsen, causing increasing distress, raising treatment costs, reducing productivity, and, too often, resulting in loss of life.

² Thankfully, artificial intelligence (AI) has come to the rescue, using computational tools and algorithms to assist with individual diagnosis and refine psychiatric diagnostic categories. In the intricate art of pattern recognition, AI far surpasses humans, whose attempts in the field of mental health have often fallen short of expectations. AI has the potential to turn this situation around. Currently, telephone- and internet-based chatbots assist with access to needed information, support, and guidance, offering non-judgmental, unbiased, and personalized care using algorithms analogous to psychotherapeutic skills such as empathy, patience, humor, and positive feedback. By utilizing big data from anonymized patient medical records, social media posts, blogs, and surveys, AI can easily arrive at working diagnoses at early stages of a disorder, reducing treatment costs and improving prognosis.

³ Dynamic therapeutic resources such as virtual reality (VR) tools and natural language processing (NLP) strategies are AI specialties. These tools may, in the future, yield significant benefits for the delivery of psychiatric services. For example, they could enable individualized personal therapy and a variety of other psychiatric interventions tailored to the needs of individual patients. Additionally, as has already been shown in Alzheimer's disease, AI reading of brain scans will improve diagnostic accuracy. With diagnostic precision comes the effective management of currently unresponsive psychiatric conditions.

⁴ AI can enhance many aspects of mental health care. The list of possibilities is long. AI can contribute to the early detection of mental disorders, refine diagnostic categories, improve the accuracy of diagnosis, personalize treatment plans, recognize risks, and predict outcomes. It can also provide remote support and monitoring, expand treatment access and affordability, and facilitate data-driven interventions. AI may substantially improve mental healthcare delivery by analyzing patient health information (PHI) such as laboratory results, interpreting imaging data, and capturing electronic health record (EHR) information to detect real-time data (RTD) trends, patterns, and problems. Beyond capturing data, AI can classify it, track progress and retrogression, and recommend treatment changes. AI algorithms can forecast probable events and provide actionable recommendations for effective triage and the prevention of tragic outcomes.

⁵ AI may prove extremely useful in self-assessment and self-management by equipping patients with tools to automate daily routines and manage distressing features of chronic or recurrent disorders. While more evidence-based studies are awaited, AI is already expanding access to mental health care. However, challenges such as ethical quandaries, privacy threats, robotic care, potential bias, inability to adapt to patient context, increasing dependence on technology, and the possibility of error must be acknowledged. The lack of regulatory frameworks and the need for ongoing oversight are also significant concerns to ensure AI applications in mental health are safe, effective, and equitable.

⁶ An obvious problem of implementation is that few mental health personnel are trained in AI technology, making it vital that training be mandatory, and providers be incentivized to keep up with technological advances. Psychologists and psychiatrists must stay current in this fast-moving field to ensure individuals receive the best care possible, integrating modern technology into psychiatric training and continuing education. While it remains unclear whether AI will be adopted in mental healthcare delivery, its presence and expansion are unquestionable. Understanding the trends, gaps, opportunities, challenges, and weaknesses of AI is essential as rules, guidelines, standards, policies, and regulatory frameworks evolve and scale upwards, requiring mental health practitioners to be ready.

PANDI-PERUMAL, Seithikurippu R. et al. Artificial intelligence is set to transform mental health services. CNS spectrums, v. 29, n. 3, p. 155-157, 2024. Disponível em: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1092852923002456. Acesso em: 30 jul. 2024. Adaptado.

According to the text, how is AI (Artificial Intelligence) expected to impact the future of mental health care?