High touch, high tech — the next frontier in mental wellness?
Tags: Therapy, Mobile Apps, Emotional Wellbeing, Mental Health, Psychology

by Rashmi Rogers

When I think of mental health in the context of an ‘average’ person, like myself, I imagine being able to talk to someone who understands my personal struggles, someone I can build a relationship with and who can also provide me with tools to deal with depression, anxiety and trauma. But an ‘average’ person, like myself, had to wait 8 years before realizing I should talk to someone, had to talk to 4–5 therapists before finding someone I could respect, and had to realize that I would be paying $200/hour and that insurance would not cover it. So as much as I would like this person to be in my life forever, I simply could not afford that luxury. A lot of my physical pains were associated with depression, and while caring for those aches was more affordable, the root cause of my ailment would never be fully addressed.

So where does that leave us? A society stymied by its systemic failure to address a fundamental need. We have evolved, emotionally, to the point where our primary concerns are not the same as that of a hunter gatherer. We struggle with far more complex ideas that need the same type of nurturing that our labor skills needed in the industrial revolution era. This is a new type of need, which cannot wait another 50 years to be addressed.

Fortunately, it has caught the attention of many, and while innovators would like to solve the ‘problem’ immediately, social change and adaptation are much slower phenomena. To truly address ‘mental health’ struggles of a person like myself, the better question is — what would make me feel like I am taking care of my mental wellness?

Let us only talk about non-serious mental illness (1) for now, which by the way, afflicts each one of us in some way at some point in our lives. Is a therapist the gold standard of mental health care? Could a chat bot, like Stanford’s, WoeBot be ‘smart’ enough to give us the boost we need? Could a CBT app be sufficient? Would becoming excellent meditators address the root cause of our affliction?

Again, from a psychology standpoint, a better question might be — what would make one feel that they are addressing mental wellness adequately? What metric, signs, or results should one look for to feel like they are doing enough to fight the darkness and fog in their brains? One that creeps up in the most inconspicuous ways, without a warning. The terrible block that threatens to destroy one’s ability to have loving relationships. Which makes one crawl towards that bottle to numb all feeling. I think the answer is different for each of us but being able to feel that we have some control on these runaway feelings is a good start.

I believe that of all the tools that are available to us in the field of mental health are needed to address the mental health pandemic we face, the High Touch, High Technology model might be the stepping-stone towards achieving mass access to high quality mental wellness. As a society, we have not reached the point where we can trust an artificial intelligence bot to understand our individual struggles adequately. And quite frankly, from a technology standpoint, we just are not there yet. We are barely scratching the surface of thinking errors, sentiment analysis and emotional intelligence with deep learning models (2).

There is promise that CBT, which has been provided via the internet since the 90’s will continue to be a popular digital health therapeutic method. But CBT is not the only weapon in a therapist’s arsenal! Solution based therapy, feedback informed therapy, narrative therapy, inhibitory control, framing, are all but a small sub-set of what a therapist may be able to use. And the over-arching premise of the personal relationship is very elusive to even the most advanced deep learning technologies. There are many breakthrough advances in sensors in their ability to sense emotions and provide insights into a person’s mind — but even so, to make sense of all this information in a way that helps the person, remains elusive.

What is that ‘magic bullet’ that can take hold of and alter our social fabric, in much the same way Facebook did, 15 years back? In that instance, the answer was simple — humans are social beings and want to be connected. Some more than others, but ultimately, social networking relies on our basic instinct to connect, share, and be acknowledged.

What is that ‘magic bullet’ that can take hold of and alter our social fabric, in much the same way Facebook did, 15 years back?

The answers are quite simple, I believe. In the case of mental wellness, it is our fundamental desire to achieve the highest degree of personal joy and achievement. We, as a people, will be agreeable to any panacea that makes us more productive and allows us to have more meaningful relationships. It’s another dawn of human awareness and while we are just coming to grips with ‘what we need’ (mental wellness), I have no doubt that the next ten years will bring some incredible and fantastic breakthroughs. These innovations will provide access to many and hold the promise of a high-quality outcomes. They will be easily accessible and affordable. While we are facing a great challenge, we finally know where we are at and where we need to go. All that remains, is to figure out how to get there.

Rashmi Rogers is the founder and CEO of the app, Emotionary.

(1) Serious mental illness (SMI) is defined as a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder resulting in serious functional impairment, which substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities, NIMH

(2) Deep Learning for language understanding of mental health concepts derived from CBT; Gasic et al. University of Cambridge, CM Insight, Imperial College London