Digital technologies, comparable to smartphones and machine learning, have revolutionized education. On 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 could also play a big role in advancing the diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders and neurological conditions.
Co-hosted by the McGovern Institute, MIT Open Learning, McClean Hospital, the Poitras Center for Psychiatric Disorders Research at MIT, and the Wellcome Trust, the symposium raised the alarm in regards to the rise in mental health challenges and showcased the potential for novel diagnostic and treatment methods.
John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT, kicked off the symposium with a call for an effort on par with the Manhattan Project, which within the Forties saw leading scientists collaborate to do what seemed unimaginable. While the challenge of mental health is kind of different, Gabrieli stressed, the complexity and urgency of the difficulty are similar. In his later talk, “How can science serve psychiatry to boost mental health?,” he noted a 35 percent rise in teen suicide deaths between 1999 and 2000 and, between 2007 and 2015, a 100% increase in emergency room visits for teens ages 5 to 18 who experienced a suicide attempt or suicidal ideation.
“We’ve got no moral ambiguity, but all of us speaking today are having this meeting partially because we feel this urgency,” said Gabrieli, who can be a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, the director of the Integrated Learning Initiative (MITili) at MIT Open Learning, and a member of the McGovern Institute. “We’ve got to do something together as a community of scientists and partners of every kind to make a difference.”
An urgent problem
In 2021, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on the rise in mental health challenges in youth; in 2023, he issued one other, warning of the consequences of social media on youth mental health. On the symposium, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, a research affiliate on the McGovern Institute and a professor of psychology and director of the Biomedical Imaging Center at Northeastern University, cited these recent advisories, saying they underscore the necessity to “innovate latest methods of intervention.”
Other symposium speakers also highlighted evidence of growing mental health challenges for youth and adolescents. Christian Webb, associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, stated that by the top of adolescence, 15-20 percent of teens could have experienced no less than one episode of clinical depression, with girls facing the very best risk. Most teens who experience depression receive no treatment, he added.
Adults who experience mental health challenges need latest interventions, too. John Krystal, the Robert L. McNeil Jr. Professor of Translational Research and chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, pointed to the limited efficacy of antidepressants, which generally take about two months to impact the patient. Patients with treatment-resistant depression face a 75 percent likelihood of relapse inside a yr of starting antidepressants. Treatments for other mental health disorders, including bipolar and psychotic disorders, have serious unintended effects that may deter patients from adherence, said Virginie-Anne Chouinard, director of research at McLean OnTrackTM, a program for first episode psychosis at McLean Hospital.
Recent treatments, latest technologies
Emerging technologies, including smartphone technology and artificial intelligence, are key to the interventions that symposium speakers shared.
In a chat on AI and the brain, Dina Katabi, the Thuan and Nicole Pham Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, discussed novel ways to detect Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, amongst other diseases. Early-stage research involved developing devices that may analyze how movement inside an area impacts the encompassing electromagnetic field, in addition to how wireless signals can detect respiration and sleep stages.
“I realize this may occasionally sound like la-la land,” Katabi said. “But it surely’s not! This device is used today by real patients, enabled by a revolution in neural networks and AI.”
Parkinson’s disease often can’t be diagnosed until significant impairment has already occurred. In a set of studies, Katabi’s team collected data on nocturnal respiration and trained a custom neural network to detect occurrences of Parkinson’s. They found the network was over 90 percent accurate in its detection. Next, the team used AI to investigate two sets of respiration data collected from patients at a six-year interval. Could their custom neural network discover patients who didn’t have a Parkinson’s diagnosis on the primary visit, but subsequently received one? The reply was largely yes: Machine learning identified 75 percent of patients who would go on to receive a diagnosis.
Detecting high-risk patients at an early stage could make a considerable difference 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, demonstrated that AI-aided suicide risk prediction model could detect 45 percent of suicide attempts or deaths with 90 percent specificity, about two to a few years prematurely.
Other presentations, including a series of lightning talks, shared latest and emerging treatments, comparable to using ketamine to treat depression; using smartphones, including day by day text surveys and mindfulness apps, in treating depression in adolescents; metabolic interventions for psychotic disorders; using machine learning to detect impairment from THC intoxication; and family-focused treatment, moderately than individual therapy, for youth depression.
Advancing understanding
The frequency and severity of antagonistic mental health events for youngsters, adolescents, and adults reveal the need of funding for mental health research — and the open sharing of those findings.
Niall Boyce, head of mental health field constructing on the Wellcome Trust — a world charitable foundation dedicated to using science to unravel urgent health challenges — outlined the inspiration’s funding philosophy of supporting research that’s “collaborative, coherent, and focused” and centers on “What’s most vital to those most affected?” Wellcome research managers Anum Farid and Tayla McCloud stressed the importance of projects that involve individuals with lived experience of mental health challenges and “blue sky pondering” that takes risks and might advance understanding in revolutionary ways. Wellcome requires that each one published research resulting from its funding be open and accessible with a purpose to maximize their advantages.
Whether through therapeutic models, pharmaceutical treatments, or machine learning, symposium speakers agreed that transformative approaches to mental health call for collaboration and innovation.
“Understanding mental health requires us to grasp the unbelievable diversity of humans,” Gabrieli said. “We’ve got to make use of all of the tools we’ve now to develop latest treatments that can work for people for whom our conventional treatments don’t.”
