Big Data analytics and artificial intelligence in mental healthcare

Mental health conditions cause a great deal of distress or impairment; depression alone will affect 11% of the world’s population. The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big-data technologies to mental health has great potential for personalizing treatment selection, prognosticating, monitoring for relapse, detecting and helping to prevent mental health conditions before they reach clinical-level symptomatology, and even delivering some treatments. However, unlike similar applications in other fields of medicine, there are several unique challenges in mental health applications, which currently pose barriers toward the implementation of these technologies. Specifically, there are very few widely used or validated biomarkers in mental health, leading to a heavy reliance on patient-and clinician-derived questionnaire data as well as interpretation of new signals such as digital phenotyping. In addition, diagnosis also lacks the same objective “gold standard” as in other conditions such as oncology, where clinicians and researchers can often rely on pathological analysis for confirmation of diagnosis. In this chapter, we discuss the major opportunities, limitations, and techniques used for improving mental healthcare through AI and big data. We explore both the computational, clinical, and ethical considerations and best practices as well as lay out the major researcher directions for the near future.