SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2718
Are psychiatrists really ready for the AI revolution?
The World Health Organization estimates that up to 15% of the population experiences mental health disorders. That has significant consequences. For example, suicide is the second- or third-leading cause of death for young people in most countries. And as the population ages, the rate of dementia is set to triple over the coming decades.
At the same time, access to mental health professionals is sorely lacking in many parts of the world, particularly in low-income countries. India, for example, has a population of 1.3 billion served by only 9,000 psychiatrists.
But technological advances can help. Smartphones and wearable sensors offer people the ability to monitor themselves and to benefit from the way deep learning can analyze the data. Indeed, these techniques are already being used to detect the changes in mood that indicate bipolar disorder or to detect people at risk of depression.
So the scene is set for artificial intelligence to become a disruptive force in psychiatry. Indeed, that's exactly what many observers predict.
But what of psychiatrists themselves? These professionals will have to play a key role in any change that artificial intelligence brings to the field. So their view ought to be a useful indicator of its potential.
Enter Murali Doraiswamy at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, and couple of colleagues. This team has surveyed psychiatrists around the world to find out how they view machine intelligence and its likely impact on mental health care.
"To our knowledge, this is the first global survey to seek the opinions of physicians on the impact of autonomous artificial intelligence/machine learning on the future of psychiatry," say the team. Curiously, the results appear to say more about psychiatrists than about the state of technological readiness or its potential.
The team's method was straightforward. The researchers randomly chose a sample of 750 professional psychiatrists registered with an online database of over 800,000 health-care professionals around the world, including 22 countries in North and South America, Europe, and Asia; 30% were women and two-thirds were white.
The respondents clearly felt that machines could never learn some skills. "An overwhelming majority (83 per cent) of respondents felt it unlikely that future technology would ever be able to provide empathic care as well as or better than the average psychiatrist," say Doraiswamy and colleagues. Interestingly, a survey of family physicians in the UK showed they had a similar view.
The group was also divided on the risks that artificial intelligence might pose. "Only 23 per cent of women predicted that the benefits of AI would outweigh the possible risks compared to 41 per cent of men," say Doraiswamy and colleagues.
But they think they know why. "The gender differences in AI risk perception may be commensurate with a large body of findings that women are more risk averse than men," they say.
The most interesting results are in the way respondents feel machine intelligence will change their jobs. Three-quarters of them thought that artificial intelligence will play an important role in managing data, such as medical records. And about half thought it would fully replace human physicians when it comes to synthesizing information to reach diagnoses.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1907.12386 : Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Psychiatry: Insights from a Global Physician Survey
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @12:19AM (6 children)
I very doubt failing synthetic personalities could be cured (or, treated?) by chemical substances. This age is the end of psychiatry, just like as of many other barbaric paradigms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @12:24AM (2 children)
The cure is of course hallucinogens, which are banned.
Cures aren't moneymakers. Treatments are.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 10 2019, @01:29AM
Altered state of consciousness do not absolutely require hallucinogens [wikipedia.org].
For example, hypoxia (also known as "auto-erotic asphyxiation" - large grin) can be used.
PERL-induced-psychosis can also lead to dissociation states [wikipedia.org] and megalomania episodes; sometimes the changes are irreversible, just ask TMB (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday September 10 2019, @01:59AM
The cure is to fix the underlying problem, whether it's social isolation, unemployment, social stigma, discrimination, sequelae of violence, hate, etc.
You'd be amazed at how many people are suffering a lack of self-worth because of the current gig economy, which was caused by big tech. Ditto the precarious employment economy, which was also caused by big tech. And the millions who have tried, and failed, to pursue riches by literally devoting their whole lives to creating a killer app that had zero hope of success because their perception of the market reality was distorted.
I've met one guy who quit his job and went on welfare to create the ultimate printer driver back in the DOS days. He believed this was God's will, and that he would earn so much money that his taxes would easily pay back a year on welfare many times.
DOS went, Windows 3x came, he continued. Then Windows 95, 98. I don't know what happened when XP came out, but this is someone who let the lure of tech make him forever unemployable, because by the time I lost track of him, his "reality" was pretty divergent from the mainstream - so much so that no sane employer would risk them.
AI won't fix this. Even reality won't. Some people are doomed.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @12:41AM
The DSM is becoming politicized by ideologue clinicians. Specifically, they refuse to accept that NPD/ASPD are untreatable, that type 1 psychopathy is a criminal classification caused by a hereditary, neurological anomaly or that these conditions are diagnosable in children. The meek inherit the earth; sit back and enjoy the process.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Tuesday September 10 2019, @01:46AM (1 child)
Back in 2017, the UN announced that it was time to stop the medicalization of mental illnesses such as depression.
See United Nations Statement criticizes medicalization of depression [madinamerica.com].
The "chemical imbalance" claim for depression has never been definitively proven, even though we've been eating antidepressants for 60 years. The last study to make the claim of being a "definitive" Cochrane review turned out to be a fraud when Norweigans dug deeper a couple of months ago.
Ever taken antidepressants? You're 297% more likely to relapse than if you try other solutions. Antidepressants don't fix the underlying problems that make a person depressed, any more than getting drunk does.
Fix the cause, which is usually social, economic, or a combination of these. For example, job loss, ongoing stigma, economic failure, illness - drugging the brain doesn't fix these underlying problems, but fixing the underlying problems fixes the depression.
Psychiatrists need to learn to stop handing out pills and help their patients fix their lives. If they can't do this, better to just turn the patient to a clued-in social worker or therapist.
BTW, the University of Toronto has just established an antipsychiatry scholarship to help find a different approach to psychiatry than just keeping people on pills.
We talk about the opiate crisis, but antidepressants not only don't control depression long-term, they have side effects that render many unable to work or even function. Long term effects include brain changes, higher suicide rates, and even cataracts, of all things. We're in an antidepressant crisis and we need to wake up.
Why do psychiatrists resort to pills? It's quick, which makes it cheaper than listening and exploring options, or referring them to a therapist or a job counsellor.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Tuesday September 10 2019, @03:52AM
Spot on. But there is one kind of depression where pills do help. If you know you have a chronic bacterial infection, but physicians don't take you seriously, it can be pretty depressing. Antibiotics will do wonders though.