Digital technologies such as smartphones and machine learning have revolutionized education. At the McGovern Institute for Brain Research's spring 2024 symposium, “Strategies for Transforming Mental Health,” experts from across the sciences, including psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, and computer science, said these technologies will also play a critical role in technological advancement. We agreed that we could do it. Diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders and neurological conditions.
Co-hosted by the McGovern Institute, MIT Open Learning, McClean Hospital, MIT's Poitras Center for Mental Disorders Research, and the Wellcome Trust, the symposium aims to raise awareness of the rise in mental health problems and develop new diagnostic and treatment methods.
John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT, opened the symposium by calling for an effort equivalent to the Manhattan Project, in which leading scientists collaborated in the 1940s to accomplish what seemed impossible. Although mental health issues are quite different, the complexity and urgency of the problems are similar, Gabrieli emphasized. He later explained in his talk, “How Can Science Help Psychiatry to Improve Mental Health?” that teen suicide deaths increased 35 percent between 1999 and 2000, and that between 2007 and 2015, they noted a 100% increase in emergency room visits. Ages 5 to 18 who have attempted suicide or experienced suicidal thoughts.
“We have no moral ambiguity, but we are having this meeting because all of us speaking today feel a sense of urgency,” said Gabrieli, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and director of the Initiative for Inclusive Learning (MITili). He is affiliated with MIT Open Learning and a member of the McGovern Institute. “We need to do something together as a community of scientists and partners of all kinds to make a difference.”
urgent matter
In 2021, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on the rise in mental health problems in youth. In 2023, he made another announcement warning about the impact of social media on youth mental health. At the symposium, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, a research fellow at the McGovern Institute, professor of psychology at Northeastern University, and director of the Biomedical Imaging Center, cited these recent recommendations and emphasized that “we must innovate new methods of intervention.” ”
Other symposium speakers also highlighted evidence that mental health problems in adolescents and young adults are on the rise. Christian Webb, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, said that by the end of adolescence, 15 to 20 percent of teens will have experienced at least one episode of clinical depression, with girls facing the highest risk. Most teens who suffer from depression do not receive treatment, he added.
Adults experiencing mental health problems also need new interventions. John Krystal, the Robert L. McNeil Jr. Professor of Translational Research and chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, noted that antidepressants have limited efficacy and typically take about two months to show effects in patients. Patients with treatment-resistant depression have a 75% chance of relapse within one year of taking antidepressants. Treatment for bipolar disorder and other mental health disorders, including psychotic disorders, has serious side effects that can hinder patient compliance, said Virginie-Anne Chouinard, director of research for McLean OnTrack™, McLean Hospital's program for first episode psychosis. I said there is.
New treatments, new technologies
Emerging technologies, including smartphone technology and artificial intelligence, are at the core of the interventions shared by symposium speakers.
In a talk on AI and the brain, Dina Katabi, Thuan and Nicole Pham Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, discussed new ways to detect several diseases, including Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. Early-stage research has included developing devices that can analyze how movement in space affects surrounding electromagnetic fields and how wireless signals can detect breathing and sleep stages.
“I know this might sound like La La Land,” Katabi said. “But it’s not like that! “These devices are being used by real patients today through the revolution in neural networks and AI.”
Parkinson's disease often cannot be diagnosed until serious damage has already occurred. In a series of studies, Katabi's team collected data on nocturnal breathing and trained a custom neural network to detect the development of Parkinson's disease. They found that the network had a detection accuracy of over 90%. Next, the team used AI to analyze two sets of breathing data collected from patients six years apart. Can a custom neural network identify patients who were not diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at their first visit but were later diagnosed with Parkinson's disease? The answer was generally yes. Machine learning identified 75% of patients who would receive a diagnosis.
Early detection of high-risk patients can make a significant difference in intervention and treatment. Similarly, research by Jordan Smoller, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Precision Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, showed that an AI-assisted suicide risk prediction model could detect 45% of suicide attempts or deaths with 90% specificity. About 2-3 years ahead.
Other presentations, including a series of lightning talks, shared new and emerging treatments, such as the use of ketamine to treat depression. Use of smartphones, including daily text surveys and mindfulness apps, in the treatment of depression in adolescents; metabolic interventions for psychotic disorders; It uses machine learning to detect damage caused by THC intoxication. Family-centered rather than individual treatment for adolescent depression.
promote understanding
The frequency and severity of adverse mental health events in children, adolescents and adults demonstrate the need for funding for mental health research and public sharing of these findings.
Niall Boyce, head of mental health sector building at the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation dedicated to using science to solve urgent health problems, explains the foundation's funding philosophy of supporting “collaborative, consistent and focused” research. and focus on the following: What matters most to those most affected?” Wellcome research managers Anum Farid and Tayla McCloud emphasized the importance of projects involving people with lived experience of mental health issues and “blue sky thinking” who can take risks and advance understanding in innovative ways. Wellcome requires that all research published as a result of its funding be open and accessible to maximize its benefit.
Whether through treatment models, medication, or machine learning, symposium presenters agreed that innovative approaches to mental health require collaboration and innovation.
“Understanding mental health requires understanding the incredible diversity of human beings,” Gabrieli said. “We need to use every tool we have today to develop new treatments that work for people for whom existing treatments don’t work.”