I'm a psychiatrist, and (like most people) I'm both intrigued and terrified about what AI will bring.
I'm not terrified about losing my job (we're spread so thin that I don't think it will be an issue for competent psychiatrists in my lifetime), but I'm terrified that the mentally ill are marginalized and that a crappy but cost-effective approach with a high margin of error may rise to prominence.
The diagnostic categories, as mentioned by just_steve, are indeed imprecise, and the RDoc approach (https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research/research-funded-by-nimh/rd...) would be a much better fit for this type of research.
Lastly, here is my dream for a good use of AI in psychiatry: With so much psychiatric care happening remotely, I would love to have a real-time dashboard/HUD with measures of disorganized speech patterns or affective intensity, etc, that I could use to supplement the information available via video link. It would be nice to have some additional data to make up for the trade-off of not being in the room. Perhaps one day with some kind of AR it might even be able to happen in the same room. It would be hard to make it not distracting, but done well it could add a lot. And if it went with the patient if they moved then it would be far more useful as it would be trained to their own personal variations. It would be really nice to catch early onset of episodes of mania or psychosis though subtle changes, and many of the public-sector patients I work with bounce around too often for someone to get to know them well enough to catch those subtle changes from baseline.
I'm not terrified about losing my job (we're spread so thin that I don't think it will be an issue for competent psychiatrists in my lifetime), but I'm terrified that the mentally ill are marginalized and that a crappy but cost-effective approach with a high margin of error may rise to prominence.
The diagnostic categories, as mentioned by just_steve, are indeed imprecise, and the RDoc approach (https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research/research-funded-by-nimh/rd...) would be a much better fit for this type of research.
Lastly, here is my dream for a good use of AI in psychiatry: With so much psychiatric care happening remotely, I would love to have a real-time dashboard/HUD with measures of disorganized speech patterns or affective intensity, etc, that I could use to supplement the information available via video link. It would be nice to have some additional data to make up for the trade-off of not being in the room. Perhaps one day with some kind of AR it might even be able to happen in the same room. It would be hard to make it not distracting, but done well it could add a lot. And if it went with the patient if they moved then it would be far more useful as it would be trained to their own personal variations. It would be really nice to catch early onset of episodes of mania or psychosis though subtle changes, and many of the public-sector patients I work with bounce around too often for someone to get to know them well enough to catch those subtle changes from baseline.