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Mental Health and Chatbots: Making it Work
The chatbots are everywhere. Anyone with internet access and wanting to pay $20 a month can build their own chatbot to well, almost anything they want. There are a lot of people playing with them, which is a good sign of cultural adoption. One area of concern however, is the use of chatbots in healthcare and more specifically, mental health.
There are few rules and loose guardrails around creating chatbots for healthcare issues including mental health apps. First I will look briefly at what chatbots are, the landscape of companies making chatbots available to all, then a look using AI in terms of healthcare and what might be done to help them benefit society.
Already, AI tools like Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning, have helped in disease detection, drug development and treatment planning. Use of AI in mental health is a nascent area, but given the mental health crisis we are in, along with healthcare systems struggling to keep up, AI will be a critical partner in the near future as mental health issues grow across industrialised societies.
What Are Chatbots
In essence, they are artificial social agents, that is, a form of social actor. All humans are social actors. We each act in different ways in the societies we live in, informed by our role in society, the cultures we live…
