The world of psikoloji is experiencing a significant change started by artificial intelligence, also known as AI. The lack of mental health professionals with adequate training resulted in a universal mental health crisis which in turn increased the need for affordable, accessible and impartial options. AI is not just something you only see in the movies, it is constantly changing three foundational aspects of care for people’s mental health: offering basic therapeutic assistance by using chat bots, developing accurate tools for diagnosis through analysis and altering the connection between the therapist and the client. The issue isn’t whether artificial intelligence will have an impact on the field of psychology but how therapists can combine it with increasing needs in an effective and ethical way.
Using Chat Bots In Therapy
One of the most obvious ways AI is incorporated into mental health treatments is chat bots, which are tools developed to provide emotional, cognitive and behavioural assistance. Platforms including Woebot use techniques such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) to process and create evidence-based coping strategies (Fitzpatrick et al., 2017). Methods like this provide several significant advantages.
First of all, chat bots provide clients with unlimited accessibility without any judgments. They give instant support to people who have mental, financial and locational difficulties that may prevent them from receiving regular therapy. In addition, clients might have prejudices against therapy so non-judgmental chat bots that ensure privacy, anonymity and discretion can assist them in overcoming that barrier. Lastly, the data chat bots provide can assist psychologists in getting information pre-therapy regarding client’s concerns, emotional and mental state while also furthering the quality of real-life therapy.
Although, current chat bots can’t replace actual psychologists. Chat bots have fixed protocols and can be quite successful in acquiring skills for Dialectical Behaviour Therapy but not in more complex and specific therapy. They can’t show actual empathy, manage critical situations such as possible suicidal tendencies or deep-rooted challenges that need a stronger client-psychologist relationship (D’Alfonso et al., 2020). Therefore, chat bots are seen as an addition and extra help, not a replacement for therapy.
AI And Diagnosis
One of the most significant advantages of teknoloji is the complete objectivity regarding diagnosis and assessments. Diagnosis focuses on reports from clients and biased assessments which makes initial diagnosis complicated. Models such as Machine Learning (ML) can process different sets of data to determine indirect symptoms of mental anguish.
AI can deal with:
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Behavioural and Bodily Information: Incorporating data from devices clients wear that measure sleep, heartbeat and processing facial micro-expressions in recorded sessions to give comprehensive and regular views of the client’s mental state.
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Linguistic Sequences: The analysis of word choice, the usage of first-person nouns from texts, conversations and sentence structure to determine linguistic symptoms of anxiety, depression and suicidal tendencies (Al-Mosaiwi & Johnstone, 2018).
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Vocal Measures: Observing slight changes in tone, pitch, speed and duration of stops which are aspects that can be too subtle for the human ear to understand regularly which can be associated with possible mental health struggles.
By assessing this information, AI can recognize people with significant challenges earlier, manage assessment plans, and reduce false diagnosis which can occur. Recognizing these is important to determine certain disorders beforehand where some triggers can be overlooked.
Exploration Of Ethics: Objectivity And Discretion
As AI is used in psychology, ethical problems increase as well. One of the more critical ones are issues about privacy and etik objectivity. Objectivity issues can occur when AI works with data that doesn’t include different populations like people with different socioeconomic levels, cultures, ethnic backgrounds (Kelly et al., 2019). If AI only focuses on information from Caucasian people with higher incomes, it may overlook other groups in society and increase inequalities. This highlights the need for varied data.
Secondly, discretion is also a huge issue. Psychological struggles can be extremely sensitive with clients describing traumatic events and private information. Companies that create AI should utilize protocols like GDPR and HIPAA to ensure data is secure and only used when necessary.
Combining AI And Psychology
The agreement is that AI won’t be able to replace psychologists but assist them instead. The future of psychology would include a combination with AI where it focuses on processing data, lifting the responsibility from therapists and helping them focus on the complexity of therapy. AI can also observe possible real-life suicidal cases, objectively analyse progress and develop personalized treatment plans that focus on environmental, genetic, cognitive and behavioural aspects. AI can also help train psychologists by offering formulations and case studies in higher amounts which may not be available in educational programs (Torous et al., 2021). Psychologists continue to provide empathy and perspective which are crucial for the therapeutic relationship which can’t be provided by any artificial program.
Combining psychology and AI should be done carefully. Psychologists should monitor the development of these programs to ensure it’s inclusive, diverse and ethical. Utilizing AI as an assistant helps psychology reach a broader audience with affordable and accessible care and therefore providing help for people who need it the most.
References
Al-Mosaiwi, M., & Johnstone, T. (2018). In an absolute state: Elevated use of absolutist words is a marker specific to anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. Clinical Psychological Science, 6(4), 529-542.
D’Alfonso, S., Lederman, R., Bucci, S., & Berry, K. (2020). The digital therapeutic alliance and human-computer interaction. JMIR Mental Health, 7(12), e21895.
Fitzpatrick, K. K., Darcy, A., & Vierhile, M. (2017). Delivering cognitive behavior therapy to young adults with symptoms of depression and anxiety using a fully automated conversational agent (Woebot): A randomized controlled trial. JMIR Mental Health, 4(2), e7785.
Kelly, C. J., Karthikesalingam, A., Suleyman, M., Corrado, G., & King, D. (2019). Key challenges for delivering clinical impact with artificial intelligence. BMC Medicine, 17(1), 195.
Torous, J., Bucci, S., Bell, I. H., Kessing, L. V., Faurholt-Jepsen, M., Whelan, P., … & Firth, J. (2021). The growing field of digital psychiatry: current evidence and the future of apps, social media, chatbots, and virtual reality. World Psychiatry, 20(3), 318-335.