Thank you for the detailed response, and I apologize for the assumptions I made about your background. I just get a bit upset and irrational sometimes about this subject, because it is one I care a lot about

I understand that human therapists can do just as much harm as good and that a lot of patients are treated terribly by the system. I think the best way to have near term positive impact on patients with mental illness is to expand access to current evidence based care and high quality practitioners. I am not talking about generous and kind front line human cannon fodder, but service models that expand access to high quality evidence based care and support and empower the mental health professionals that deal with severe, complex patients so these patients don't have to deal with terrible destructive therapists

For serious mental illness and psychosis, I understand that expanding access to services is not always enough, although we do have existing pharmaceutical interventions that can help certain patients, and that improving access to some of these medications could be helpful.

I appreciate your comment that I am "hand waving", but I believe that proponents of an AI solving mental health are likewise hand-waving and assuming that mental illness can 1) be reduced to a problem that is tractable with current or near term AI tools or 2) that the singularity and godlike AI is inevitable. As far as I know, both of those are beliefs, not foregone conclusions. I am open to being convinced, but i have not seen any solid evidence or specific hypotheses for how AI would help mental illness beyond chatbots, and while chatbots can certainly help some people they will not be a cure all

I would love to see evidence that I am overestimating the diversity and complexity of mental illness. From what I understand we don't know enough about these conditions to know how complex and diverse they are, but our current tools have failed to bound or characterize the complexity or diversity of mental illness in a way that make them tractable problems. Decades of study of the genetics and mechanisms of depression have failed to yield any breakthroughs, and we couldn't even predict which genes are associated with the disease (no serotonin / dopamine genes are that strongly correlated with disease). Fmri and eeg have horrible resolution and do very little to elucidate biochemical pathways. No new drugs with novel mechanisms have been developed for psychiatric disorders in decades. I'm not an AI expert by any means, but without tools to collect useful data, I can't see how AI could deliver much that is useful in terms of characterizing the biology of disease and intervening

Rather than invest in AI, I would like to see more investment in higher resolution, dynamic tools to analyze molecular pathways in the brain in Vivo. That would probably generate enough low hanging fruit that you could develop better treatments without AI tools

I went to a talk by Tom Insel, the former head of NIMH who was at Verily and now at a MH startup, and he told a story about how he gave a talk on the research of genetics in mental illness to a group of patients and their families. A parent of a child with sever mental illness stood up and said "you don't get it. The house is on fire and you're talking about the chemistry of the paint". Maybe I'm missing something, but I sort of feel like this when people talk about AI or apps for mental illness

Anyway I appreciate you sharing your thoughts so objectively, fairly and openly and hope that mental health care will improve through AI or other means