New AI Mental Health Tools Beat Human Doctors at Assessing Patients.

A New AI Mental Health Tools Beat Human Doctors at Assessing Patients. Mental health professionals have smarter tools than ever before, with artificial intelligence-related technology coming to the forefront to help diagnose patients, often with much greater accuracy than humans. A new study published in the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, for example, showed that machine learning is up to 93 percent accurate in identifying a suicidal person. The research, led by John Pestian, a professor at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, involved 379 teenage patients from three area hospitals. Each patient completed standardized behavioral rating scales and participated in a semi-structured interview, answering five open-ended questions such as "Are you angry?" to stimulate conversation, according to a press release from the university. The researchers analyzed both verbal and non-verbal language from the data, then sent the information through a machine-learning algorithm that was able to determine with remarkable accuracy whether the person was suicidal, mentally ill but not suicidal, or neither. A study just published in the journal Psychological Bulletin further punctuated the need for better tools to help with suicide prevention. A meta-analysis of 365 studies conducted over the last 50 years found that the ability of mental health experts to predict if someone will attempt suicide is “no better than chance.”more