Artificial Intelligence’s Role in the Future of Mental Illness
By: Kevin Haube
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Therapy, Mental Health, Machine Learning, Psychology

The Ethics of Where We’re Going

Artificial Intelligence exists in three subcategories: Artificial Narrow Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence, and Artificial Super Intelligence (du Toit, 2019). Blackwell and colleagues have employed an Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) — and AI built to perform one specific task, rather than mimic the true intelligence of humans — in their efforts to better match a patient to a therapist and psychotherapeutic method. While this use of ANI has been generally perceived as a success, there is no shortage of ethical concerns surrounding its use in healthcare. Among the many, common concerns tend to center around discrimination, lack of privacy, and lack of transparency or understanding of how the systems are built and operate, and despite actions being taken to prepare for these understandable concerns, often enforcing them is an entirely different struggle all together (Mörch et al. 2020).

An approach taken by many has been to develop checklists. The Canada Protocol, an ethical checklist for the use of artificial intelligence in suicide prevention and mental healthcare, is one such list. The approach: build a team consisting of experts, ethicists, and professors across the fields of psychological and computer sciences to develop questions, extract evidence, develop recommendations, and have them reviewed by a panel of peers for further revising. As a result, a list of 44 items were submitted, divided by types of concern: “Description of the Autonomous Intelligence System”, “Privacy and Transparency”, “Security”, “Health-Related Risks”, and “Biases” (Mörch et al. 2020). This ethical checklist outlines actions necessary to provide a safe product to the public, including transparency surrounding data collection, manipulation, and sharing, as well as levels of autonomy and moderation of the system. As an end-user, this type of information would often be presented in the form of an End User Licensing Agreement. While these ethical concerns are constantly being thought about and addressed, it’s imperative to state that legal precedent still has yet to be established for the misuse and inevitable shortcomings of Artificial Intelligence in healthcare, especially in high-stakes use-cases as suicide prevention.

In accordance with the Canada Protocol, developers and doctors are able to ideate new and innovative uses for ANI systems within mental health research and treatment while remaining ethically sound. One such use, inspired by the 2013 film Her — starring Joaquin Phoenix as a lonely individual who falls in love with his AI-based virtual assistant, voiced by Scarlet Johannsen — could be a virtual assistant serving as a biometric-driven emergency responder for individuals experiencing panic attacks, anxiety attacks, various forms of depressive episodes, and more. Wearable technologies such as the Apple Watch or Fitbit Charge could provide the input necessary for a trained machine learning algorithm to accurately predict whether an individual is suffering a mental health emergency or perhaps just enjoying a jog through the neighborhood. For example, incoming data from a heartrate monitoring device with additional capabilities such as GPS tracking, and the ability to tell whether or not you’re standing up, could transmit those three inputs to an Artificially Intelligent system to determine whether your raised heartrate were due to a high-intensity activity or a panic attack. In a similar way, researchers in Korea have had success rates over 78.4% in predicting whether an individual suffers from a panic disorder or some other form of anxiety disorder using a Logistic Regression Machine Learning algorithm and one singular input: heartrate variance (Na et al. 2021). Utilizing the same “fingerprint” method Blackwell and colleagues used to match a patient to a clinician and methodology, so too could this program match you to a trained personality. Whether a virtual assistant would make a patient feel more secure with a male or female voice, what words would likely aid in calming a panic-ridden individual, and determining whether or not a sufferer is capable of vocally responding are all within the realm of possibility for properly-trained Artificially Intelligent systems.

To abide by the Canada Protocol, we must remain fully transparent in the development of our theoretical system. Firstly, our objective(s): we are aiming to mitigate the damage of triggered responses to panic disorders, anxiety disorders, and mood disorders. Additionally, we’ll need written, verbal, or virtual content outlining our funding, any potential conflicts of interest, credentials, target population, any evidence supporting our marketing claims, our testing protocol, and any complaints expressed about our system. From there, an End User License Agreement would need to be created and presented in an ethical way; in short, it should not be presented as a long legal document with an easy-to-click “Agree” button in our software, but rather bulleted or outlined, showcasing key information such as legal responsibility, data collection practices, accessibility, consent and withdrawal of consent, access to one’s data, the right to be forgotten, and data collection from minors among other security-related practices. Lastly, messaging surrounding heath risks and potential biases must be presented in easily digestible manners. Considering the 56% rise in suicide rates for people ages 10–24 between 2007 and 2017 (Tanzi, 2019), these forms of communication should be catered towards younger audiences, potentially through social media and online entertainment hubs like YouTube.

This thought exercise was meant to develop a safe and ethical business plan surrounding the release of a theoretical AI-based mental health platform. However, this technology would still exist within the realm of Artificial Narrow Intelligence, the lowest of the three tiers of Artificial Intelligence. In a survey conducted by Oracle, 80% of individuals surveyed were willing to receive therapeutic services from a robot (Hickins, 2020). While modern day robots are capable of mimicking human behavior, the role of a counselor and therapist requires emotional cognition and advanced sentiment analysis that ANI is just not capable of; this level of mental health treatment by Artificial Intelligence certainly requires Artificial General Intelligence. Artificial General Intelligence is where machine transcend single-function uses and begin to mimic human intelligence, even going as far as to become sentient, driven by emotional desires and capable of abstract thought (du Toit, 2019). This level of AI has yet to be achieved, however that presents the human species the perfect time to address use cases and ethical concerns the same way we have with Artificial Narrow Intelligence.

Though they are driven by similar technology, ANI and AGI differ drastically in their ethical concerns; we are shifting away from the simple privacy and security concerns of present day into far more complex concerns like the value of an AI life, cohabitation of our species with another fully-sentient lifeform, and even “playing God”. The evolution of man’s desire to transcend their God-given right to rule over His creation into a realm where they are the creators themselves has been documented through a multitude of historic events and religious texts (du Toit, 2019). If we are to create machines in our likeness, designed with brains that function as ours and provide consciousness, what is stopping these machines from becoming as fallible as humans in the eye of their creator? To better raise and address the concerns of Artificial General Intelligence, the human species must make drastic strides in their understanding of their own consciousness, the value and rights associated with their own lives, and come to an agreement on a baseline moral and ethical code.