The Lancet — Digital Health
October 10, 2022
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY — by the Site Editor:
Joaquim Cardoso MSc
Health Transformation — multidisciplinary institute and content portal
October 11, 2022
What is the problem?
- The theme to “Make mental health and well-being for all a global priority” highlights the ubiquitous need to address the world’s growing mental health crisis.
- A 2022 world mental health report published by WHO showed that global prevalence of anxiety and depressive disorders rose more than 25% during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic
- WHO estimates that around 20% of all children and adolescents live with a mental health condition, representing an urgent problem in young people.
- Although effective interventions for mental disorders exist, barriers to access mean there has been no evidence of a global reduction in mental health burden since 1990.
- Due to social distancing brought on by the pandemic, online and virtual mental health interventions have grown in usage out of necessity.
What is the question?
- Are digital tools the panacea to address the global mental health crisis, and particularly the mental health of young people?
What is the scope of the Lancet Publication? What is the potential?
- In this issue of The Lancet Digital Health, the Digital Mind Series discusses the latest opportunities and challenges of digital tools in tackling the global burden of mental disorders.
- A plethora of digital tools have shown potential in addressing mental health problems.
(1) mobile phone and internet programs that use coaching, therapist-guided and self-guided techniques applications in depression, anxiety and the risk of suicide;
(2) gamified smartphone apps and social media data for prediction of mental health status .
What are some of the issues?
- …. currently, features of the computational tools used to interpret the population-reflective passive data are not well defined, …
- … the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has just announced the launch of their Bridge2AI program, aimed at accelerating the use of artificial intelligence in biomedical and behavioural research communities, which could tackle this issue.
What are some of the findings?
- The Digital Mind Series has highlighted promise in the field of digital mental health, but clear challenges remain, particularly for tools used by young people.
- Interdisciplinary engagement from data scientists, mental health clinicians, funding bodies (eg, NIH), and patients is crucial to ensure the implementation of effective, robust, trustworthy tools that might improve the long-term mental health of the most vulnerable groups at this uncertain time in their lives.
ORIGINAL PUBLICATION
October 10 is World Mental Health Day.
The theme to “Make mental health and well-being for all a global priority” highlights the ubiquitous need to address the world’s growing mental health crisis.
Although effective interventions for mental disorders exist, barriers to access mean there has been no evidence of a global reduction in mental health burden since 1990.
In fact, a 2022 world mental health report published by WHO showed that global prevalence of anxiety and depressive disorders rose more than 25% during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although effective interventions for mental disorders exist, barriers to access mean there has been no evidence of a global reduction in mental health burden since 1990.
WHO estimates that around 20% of all children and adolescents live with a mental health condition, representing an urgent problem in young people.
Due to social distancing brought on by the pandemic, online and virtual mental health interventions have grown in usage out of necessity.
WHO estimates that around 20% of all children and adolescents live with a mental health condition, representing an urgent problem in young people.
But are digital tools the panacea to address the global mental health crisis, and particularly the mental health of young people?
In this issue of The Lancet Digital Health, the Digital Mind Series discusses the latest opportunities and challenges of digital tools in tackling the global burden of mental disorders.
A plethora of digital tools have shown potential in addressing mental health problems.
For instance, mobile phone and internet programs that use coaching, therapist-guided and self-guided techniques have been shown to reduce depressive symptoms and anxiety in controlled clinical trial settings.
Additionally, gamified smartphone apps and social media data have been used on a larger scale to predict mental health status in users, as mentioned by Hauser and colleagues in their Series paper; indeed, data collected from social media has been used to assess the presence of conditions, such as depression and the risk of suicide.
A plethora of digital tools have shown potential in addressing mental health problems :
(1) mobile phone and internet programs that use coaching, therapist-guided and self-guided techniques applications in depression, anxiety and the risk of suicide;
(2) gamified smartphone apps and social media data for prediction of mental health status .
Although Hauser and colleagues note that currently, features of the computational tools used to interpret the population-reflective passive data are not well defined, …
… the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has just announced the launch of their Bridge2AI program, aimed at accelerating the use of artificial intelligence in biomedical and behavioural research communities, which could tackle this issue.
Importantly, the program also intends to provide resources to promote best practices in the use of datasets, which could be instrumental to address concerns regarding data sharing and privacy in the context of mental health data, when sensitive information on symptoms might be gathered alongside data such as age and location.
…. currently, features of the computational tools used to interpret the population-reflective passive data are not well defined, …
… the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has just announced the launch of their Bridge2AI program, aimed at accelerating the use of artificial intelligence in biomedical and behavioural research communities, which could tackle this issue.
Another obstacle in the success of digital interventions is an absence of sustained engagement with such tools, as evidenced by high attrition rates in clinical studies.
In their Series paper,
- Koutsouleris and colleagues highlight several barriers that exist in bridging the preliminary development stages of mental health status prediction tools, such as prognostic machine learning approaches, and their implementation in clinical settings.
- Koutsouleris and colleagues note that studies using these approaches rarely consider implementation, and generally do not involve input from users during the design.
Clinician and patient input and feedback is essential when designing these tools to improve engagement and usability.
Indeed, co-design involving young people has been useful in the context of mental health technologies.
The development and implementation of digital tools for vulnerable groups, such as children and adolescents, require extra care because these users are more susceptible to manipulation via digital platforms.
For approaches such as computational risk prediction models to have tangible clinical impacts, clinicians and patients need to be able to trust the tools being integrated into care settings.
Hauser and colleagues describe how models used to predict mental health status for a specific psychiatric condition are not explainable as a result of their complexity, which can lead to a reluctance of some clinicians to use the models.
Trust is also dependent on the use of unbiased tools, which needs to be built using large, diverse, purpose-built mental health datasets that are representative of the real-world populations.
In their Series paper,
Koutsouleris and colleagues highlight several barriers that exist in bridging the preliminary development stages of mental health status prediction tools, such as : (1) prognostic machine learning approaches, and (2) their implementation in clinical settings.
The Digital Mind Series has highlighted promise in the field of digital mental health, but clear challenges remain, particularly for tools used by young people.
Interdisciplinary engagement from data scientists, mental health clinicians, funding bodies (eg, NIH), and patients is crucial to ensure the implementation of effective, robust, trustworthy tools that might improve the long-term mental health of the most vulnerable groups at this uncertain time in their lives.
The Digital Mind Series has highlighted promise in the field of digital mental health, but clear challenges remain, particularly for tools used by young people.
Interdisciplinary engagement from data scientists, mental health clinicians, funding bodies (eg, NIH), and patients is crucial …
Originally published at https://www.thelancet.com.
Names mentioned
Nikolaos Koutsouleris
Tobias U Hauser,
Vasilisa Skvortsova,
Munmun De Choudhury,
