Mental health

Axios reporter Alison Snyder writes about how a new study by MIT researchers finds that preconceived notions about AI chatbots can impact people’s experiences with them. Prof. Pattie Maes explains, the technology's developers “always think that the problem is optimizing AI to be better, faster, less hallucinations, fewer biases, better aligned, but we have to see this whole problem as a human-plus-AI problem. The ultimate outcomes don't just depend on the AI and the quality of the AI. It depends on how the human responds to the AI.”

MIT researchers have found that user bias can drive interactions with AI chatbots, reports Nick Hilden for Scientific American.  “When people think that the AI is caring, they become more positive toward it,” graduate student Pat Pataranutaporn explains. “This creates a positive reinforcement feedback loop where, at the end, the AI becomes much more positive, compared to the control condition. And when people believe that the AI was manipulative, they become more negative toward the AI—and it makes the AI become more negative toward the person as well.”

Lynette Seow MBA ’23 co-founded Safe Space Singapore, a B2B2C platform aimed at strengthening “mental resilience by providing tele-therapy care and prevention education,” reports Matt Symonds for Forbes. “Ultimately, I figured that if I wanted to build a Safe Space for people to come to, I had to be one to the people I met,” shares Seow. “If improving mental health is my mission, and a disproportionate percentage of LGBTQ+ people experience mental health struggles, how could I ignore drawing attention to this cause even if it meant being a bit more public about my personal life?"

Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi speaks with Yahoo News reporter Rebecca Corey about the benefits and risks posed by the use of AI tools in health care. “I think the problem is when you try to naively replace humans with AI in health care settings, you get really poor results,” says Ghassemi. “You should be looking at it as an augmentation tool, not as a replacement tool.”

Prof. Alexey Makarin and his colleagues have found that following the arrival of Facebook, depression, anxiety and diminished academic performance increased across U.S. colleges, reports Jesse Greenspan for Scientific American. “Makarin says much of the harm they documented came from social comparisons,” explains Greenspan.

A study led by Steven Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute, found that the AKAP11 gene has a significant impact on a person’s risk for bipolar disorder, reports Kirstie Ganobsik for HealthDay. “This work is exciting because it's the first time we've had a gene with large-effect mutations for bipolar disorder," says Hyman.  

Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi speaks with NPR host Emily Kwong and correspondent Geoff Brumfiel about how artificial intelligence could impact medicine. “When you take state-of-the-art machine-learning methods and systems and then evaluate them on different patient groups, they do not perform equally,” says Ghassemi.

Prof. Alexey Makarin speaks with NPR’s Michaeleen Doucleff about his research examining the impact of social media on teen mental health. "The body of literature seems to suggest that indeed, social media has negative effects on mental health, especially on young adults' mental health," says Makarin.

Aagya Mathur MBA ’18 co-founded Aavia, a daily ovarian hormone health guide, reports Matt Symonds for Forbes. “We started Aavia to give young people tools to understand how their hormones impact how they feel,” Mathur explains.

Researchers from MIT and Boston Children’s Hospital are working on developing new technology that could help predict and identify diseases through audio recordings of a patient’s voice, reports Jim Morelli for Boston 25 News. “It’s almost like being Sherlock Holmes to voice, taking voice as a signal and trying to understand what’s going on behind it,” said Satrajit Ghosh, a principal research scientist at the McGovern Institute. “And can we backtrack from voice and say this is ‘Disorder A’ versus ‘Disorder B’?” 

Graduate student Evan Soltas and Gopi Shah Goda, deputy director of Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research, explore the impact that Covid-19 has had on the workforce, reports Sarah Todd for Quartz. “People ages 65 and up are more likely to leave the workforce after contracting Covid compared to younger people,” say Soltas and Goda.

A study by graduate student Evan Soltas and Gopi Shah Goda, deputy director of Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research, underlines the pandemic’s impact on labor supply in the United States, reports Richard Luscombe for The Guardian. “Our estimates suggest Covid-19 illnesses have reduced the US labor force by approximately 500,000 people,” say Soltas and Goda.

A study by graduate student Evan Soltas and Gopi Shah Goda, deputy director of Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research, explores the economic toll of Covid-19, including acute illness and long Covid, reports Erin Prater for Fortune. The paper “also looks at the impact of other Covid-related medical consequences like organ damage, mental health issues, new kidney and heart problems, and the worsening of preexisting illness, in addition to the phenomenon of Covid forcing older workers into early retirement,” explains Prater.

Craig Ferguson, a full stack developer at the MIT Media Lab, has developed a mobile mental health game, dubbed Paradise Island, that sends users on real-life missions in exchange for rewards and is based on a type of therapy called behavioral  activation, reports Elissaveta Brandon for Fast Company. “One of the goals behind the app is to teach people a lesson, to help them build skills and resilience,” Ferguson says. “If you do this enough, that reflection step is to make people realize ‘When I was feeling bad, I really didn’t think running would help, but it did,’ and remember that.”

Rob Morris PhD ’14 has dedicated his career to easing access to mental health services online, reports Shalene Gupta for Fast Company. “When you search for a flight on Google, you get directed to these options that make you instantly buy a flight,” he says. “The interface is beautiful. But when you look up mental health, it’s not great. I want to do for mental health what Google did for flights.”