Digital technologies such as smartphones and machine learning have revolutionized education. At the McGovern Institute for Brain Research’s 2024 spring symposium titled “Transformational Strategies in Mental Health,” experts from various scientific fields – including psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, computer science and others – agreed that these technologies could also play a significant role in advances in the diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders and neurological diseases.
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 alarm about the rise of mental health challenges and demonstrated the potential of novel diagnostics and treatments.
John Gabrieli, the 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 accomplish what seemed impossible. Gabrieli emphasized that the challenge posed by mental health is completely different, but the complexity and urgency of the problem are similar. In his later speech titled “How Can Science Serve Psychiatry to Improve Mental Health?” noted a 35 percent escalate in teen suicide deaths from 1999 to 2000, and from 2007 to 2015 a 100 percent escalate in emergency room visits for youth ages 5 to 18 who had experienced a suicide attempt or suicidal ideation.
“We have no moral ambiguity, but all of us who are speaking today are attending 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 Fellow of the McGovern Institute. “We need to do something together as a community of scientists and all kinds of partners to make a difference.”
Urgent problem
In 2021, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory regarding the escalate in mental health issues in youth; in 2023, issued another warning about the impact of social media on youthful people’s mental health. During the symposium, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, a research fellow at the McGovern Institute and professor of psychology and director of the Center for Biomedical Imaging at Northeastern University, cited these latest recommendations, emphasizing the need to “innovate new methods of intervention.” “
Other symposium speakers also highlighted evidence of growing mental health challenges among youth and adolescents. Christian Webb, a professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, said that by the end of adolescence, 15 to 20 percent of teenagers will experience at least one episode of clinical depression, with girls at the greatest risk. He added that most teenagers experiencing depression do not receive treatment.
Adults who experience mental health problems also need new interventions. John Krystal, Robert L. McNeil Jr. Professor of Translational Studies and head of the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, drew attention to the limited effectiveness of antidepressants, the effect of which usually appears in the patient after about two months. Patients with treatment-resistant depression have a 75% chance of relapse within a year of starting antidepressants. Treatments for other mental disorders, including bipolar disorder and psychotic disorders, have serious side effects that can discourage patients from complying, said Virginie-Anne Chouinard, director of research at McLean OnTrackTM, a first-episode psychosis treatment program at McLean Hospital.
New treatment methods, new technologies
The key to the speeches shared by the symposium speakers are new technologies, including smartphone technology and artificial intelligence.
During a lecture on artificial intelligence and the brain, Dina Katabi, Thuan and Nicole Pham professors of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, discussed novel ways of detecting Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, among others. Early-stage research included developing devices that could analyze the effects of movement in space on the surrounding electromagnetic field, as well as how wireless signals could detect the stages of breathing and sleep.
“I realize this may sound la-la land,” Katabi said. “But it’s not! This device is used by real patients today, made possible by the revolution in neural networks and artificial intelligence.”
Parkinson’s disease often cannot be diagnosed until significant impairment is already present. In a series of studies, Katabi’s team collected nighttime breathing data and trained a custom neural network to detect cases of Parkinson’s disease. They found that network detection was effective with over 90% accuracy. The team then used artificial intelligence to analyze two sets of breathing data collected from patients six years apart. Would their custom neural network be able to identify patients who were not diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at their first visit but were later diagnosed with it? The answer was largely yes: machine learning identified 75 percent of patients who received a diagnosis.
Detecting high-risk patients at an early stage can have important implications 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, found that an AI-powered suicide risk prediction model could detect 45 percent of suicide attempts or deaths with 90 percent specificity. about two or three years in advance.
Progress in 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 its results.
Niall Boyce, director of mental health at the Wellcome Trust – a global charity that aims to use science to solve urgent health problems – outlined the foundation’s funding philosophy of supporting research that is “collaborative, coherent and focused” and focuses on “What is most important to those most affected?” Wellcome research managers Anum Farid and Tayla McCloud stressed the importance of projects engaging people with lived experience of mental health challenges and “blue sky thinking” that takes risks and can deepen understanding in innovative ways. Wellcome requires that all published research resulting from its funding be open and accessible to maximize its benefits.
Whether it’s therapeutic models, pharmaceutical treatments, or machine learning, symposia speakers agreed that a transformative approach to mental health requires collaboration and innovation.
“Understanding mental health requires understanding the incredible diversity of people,” Gabrieli said. “We need to use all the tools at our disposal to develop new treatments that will work for people for whom our conventional treatments are not effective.”