Digital technologies such as smartphones and machine learning have revolutionized education. At the McGovern Institute for Brain Research's 2024 Spring Symposium, “Transformational Strategies in Mental Health,” experts from across the sciences, including psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and others, agreed that these technologies They could also play an important role moving forward. the diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders and neurological conditions.
Jointly organized by the McGovern Institute, MIT Open Learning, McClean Hospital, the MIT Poitras Center for Research in Psychiatric Disorders, and the Wellcome Trust, the symposium raised the alarm about rising mental health challenges and showed the potential of new diagnostic methods and treatment methods.
John Gabrieli, Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and technology at MIT, opened the symposium with a call for an effort on par with the Manhattan Project, in which leading scientists collaborated in the 1940s to make what seemed impossible. While the challenge of mental health is quite different, Gabrieli emphasized, the complexity and urgency of the issue are similar. In his subsequent talk, “How can science serve psychiatry to improve mental health?”, he noted a 35 percent increase in adolescent suicide deaths between 1999 and 2000 and, between 2007 and 2015, an increase 100 percent in emergency room visits for youth ages 5 to 18 between 1999 and 2000 who experienced a suicide attempt or suicidal ideation.
“We have no moral ambiguity, but all of us who spoke today held 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 have to do something together as a community of scientists and partners of all kinds to make a difference.”
An urgent problem
In 2021, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory regarding the rise in mental health problems in young people; In 2023, he issued another, warning about the effects of social media on young people's mental health. At the symposium, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, a research associate at the McGovern Institute and professor of psychology and director of the Center for Biomedical Imaging at Northeastern University, cited these recent advisories and said they underscore the need to “innovate new methods of intervention. “
Other speakers at the symposium also highlighted evidence of growing mental health challenges for youth and adolescents. Christian Webb, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, said that by late adolescence, 15 to 20 percent of adolescents will have experienced at least one episode of clinical depression, with girls being the most common. the greatest risk. Most teens who experience depression go untreated, he added.
Adults experiencing mental health problems also need new interventions. John Krystal, Robert L. McNeil Jr. Professor of Translational Research and chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, noted the limited effectiveness of antidepressants, which typically take about two months to take effect in the patient. . Patients with treatment-resistant depression face a 75 percent chance of relapsing within a year of starting antidepressants. Treatments for other mental health disorders, including bipolar and psychotic disorders, have serious side effects that can deter patients from adherence, said Virginie-Anne Chouinard, research director of McLean OnTrackTM, a program for first-episode psychosis. at McLean Hospital.
New treatments, new technologies.
Emerging technologies, including smartphone technology and artificial intelligence, are key to the interventions that symposium speakers shared.
In a talk about ai and the brain, Dina Katabi, the Thuan and Nicole Pham Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at MIT, discussed new ways to detect Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, among other diseases. Research in its early stages involved developing devices that can analyze how movement within a space impacts 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 used today by real patients, thanks to a revolution in neural networks and artificial intelligence.”
Parkinson's disease often cannot be diagnosed until significant deterioration has already occurred. In a series of studies, Katabi's team collected data on nighttime breathing and trained a custom neural network to detect cases of Parkinson's. They found that the network had a detection accuracy of over 90 percent. Next, the team used ai to analyze two sets of respiratory data collected from patients over a six-year interval. Could your personalized neural network identify patients who did not have a Parkinson's diagnosis at the first visit, but subsequently received one? The answer was largely yes: Machine learning identified 75 percent of patients who would receive a diagnosis.
Early detection of high-risk patients could make a substantial 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 ai-assisted suicide risk prediction model could detect 45 percent of suicide attempts or deaths with 90 percent specificity. about two or three years in advance.
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, to treat depression in adolescents; metabolic interventions for psychotic disorders; using machine learning to detect impairment caused by THC intoxication; and family-centered treatment, rather than individual therapy, for youth depression.
Advancing understanding
The frequency and severity of adverse mental health events in children, adolescents, and adults demonstrate the need to fund mental health research and openly share these findings.
Niall Boyce, head of mental health field development at the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation dedicated to using science to solve urgent health challenges, described the foundation's funding philosophy of supporting research that is “collaborative, coherent and focused” and focus on “What is most important to those most affected?” Wellcome research directors Anum Farid and Tayla McCloud highlighted the importance of projects that engage people with lived experience of mental health challenges and “blue sky thinking” that takes risks and can promote understanding in innovative ways . Wellcome requires that all published research resulting from its funding be open and accessible to maximize its benefits.
Whether through therapeutic models, pharmaceutical treatments or machine learning, symposium speakers agreed that transformative approaches to mental health require collaboration and innovation.
“Understanding mental health requires us to understand the incredible diversity of human beings,” Gabrieli said. “We have to use all the tools we have now to develop new treatments that work for people for whom our conventional treatments don't work.”
