Digital technologies such as smartphones and machine learning have revolutionized education. At the McGovern Institute for Brain Research’s 2024 Spring Symposium, “Transformative Strategies in Mental Health,” experts from a variety of disciplines—including psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and more—agreed that these technologies could also play a significant role in progress. diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders and neurological conditions.
The symposium, co-hosted by the McGovern Institute, MIT Open Learning, McClean Hospital, the Poitras Center for Psychiatric Disorders Research at MIT, and the Wellcome Trust, raised the alarm about the rise of mental health problems and showed the potential for new diagnosis and treatment methods.
John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT, opened the symposium with a call for an effort comparable to the Manhattan Project, which saw leading scientists collaborate on the seemingly impossible in the 1940s. While the mental health issue is quite different, Gabrieli pointed out, the complexity and urgency of the problem are similar. In his later lecture, “How Science Can Serve Psychiatry to Improve Mental Health,” he noted a 35 percent increase in teen suicide deaths between 1999 and 2000, and a 100 percent increase in emergency room visits between 2007 and 2015 among youth ages 5 to 18 who experienced attempted suicide. suicide or suicidal thoughts.
“We have no moral ambiguity, but all of us who are speaking today are having this meeting in part because we feel this urgency,” said Gabrieli, who is also a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and director of the Integrated Learning Initiative (MITili). at 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 problem
In 2021, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on the rise of mental health problems in youth; released another in 2023, warning of the effects of social media on youth mental health. At the symposium, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, research affiliate at the McGovern Institute and professor of psychology and director of the Biomedical Imaging Center at Northeastern University, cited these recent recommendations, saying they underscore the need to “innovate new methods of intervention. “
Other symposium speakers also highlighted evidence of growing youth and adolescent mental health issues. Christian Webb, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, said that by the end of adolescence, 15-20 percent of teens will have at least one episode of clinical depression, with girls at the highest risk. Most teenagers who suffer from depression do not receive any treatment, he added.
Adults experiencing mental health problems also need new interventions. John Krystal, Robert L. McNeil Jr. Professor of Translational Research and chairman of the department of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, pointed out the limited effectiveness of antidepressants, which usually take about two months to work on the patient. Patients with treatment-resistant depression face a 75 percent chance of relapse within one year of starting antidepressants. Treatments for other mental health disorders, including bipolar and psychotic disorders, have serious side effects that can discourage patients from adherence, said Virginia-Anne Chouinard, research director of McLean OnTrackTM, the first-episode psychosis program at McLean Hospital.
New treatment, new technology
Emerging technologies, including smartphone technology and artificial intelligence, are key to the interventions that symposium speakers shared.
Dina Katabi, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT Thuan and Nicole Pham discussed new ways to detect Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, among others, in a lecture on AI and the brain. Early-stage research has included developing devices that can analyze how movement in space affects the surrounding electromagnetic field, as well as how wireless signals can detect breathing and sleep stages.
“I realize this may sound like la-la land,” Katabi said. “But it’s not! This device is being used by real patients today, made possible by the revolution in neural networks and AI.”
Parkinson’s disease is often not diagnosed until significant damage has already occurred. In a set of studies, Katabi’s team collected nighttime breathing data and trained their own neural network to detect the occurrence of Parkinson’s disease. They found that the network was over 90 percent accurate in detection. Next, the team used AI to analyze two sets of breathing data collected from patients over a six-year interval. Could their own neural network identify patients who were not diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the first visit, but later received it? The answer was largely yes: Machine learning identified 75 percent of patients who would go on to be diagnosed.
Early detection of high-risk patients could be crucial for 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-powered suicide risk prediction model could detect 45 percent of suicide attempts or deaths with 90 percent specificity. about two to three years ahead.
Other presentations, including a series of lightning talks, shared new and emerging treatments such as the use of ketamine to treat depression; the use of smartphones, including daily text surveys and mindfulness apps, in the treatment of adolescent depression; metabolic interventions for psychotic disorders; using machine learning to detect damage from THC intoxication; and treatment of youth depression rather than individual family-centered therapy.
Advancing understanding
The frequency and severity of adverse mental health events in children, adolescents and adults demonstrates the need to fund mental health research – and share these findings openly.
Niall Boyce, head of mental health at the Wellcome Trust – a global charitable foundation dedicated to using science to tackle pressing health problems – outlined the foundation’s funding philosophy, which is to support research that is “collaborative, coherent and focused” and focuses on “What Matters Most to Those Most Affected?” Wellcome Research Managers Anum Farid and Tayla McCloud highlighted the importance of projects that involve people with lived experience of mental health problems and ‘blue sky thinking’ that takes risks and can be deepened in innovative ways understanding.Wellcom requires that all published research resulting from its funding be open and accessible in order to maximize its benefits.
Symposium speakers agreed that transformative approaches to mental health require collaboration and innovation, whether through therapeutic models, pharmaceutical treatments or machine learning.
“Understanding mental health requires us to understand the incredible diversity of people,” Gabrieli said. “We need to use all the tools we have now to develop new treatments that will work for people for whom our conventional treatments don’t work.”