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Re:The Moral Urgency of Mental Health by aaavl2821 on Monday November 27, 2017 @08:49PM (#15793567)
That's a really good point and I agree that those tools could really help people. Anonymous expression of suffering can be therapeutic; people say things to Siri that they've never told anyone

I just have an adverse intellectual and emotional reaction when I hear people suggest AI / some app is the solution to mental illness. It devalues the hard and thankless work that therapists do, reduces people's deep suffering to a trivial engineering problem, naively presumes superiority to the centuries of research humankind has done on the mind and suffering, and is just logically and factually incorrect

There are plenty of ways to improve access to care that would have more cost-effective benefit than AI. If people started investing in those then maybe we could actually see some improvement

/endrant

Re:The Moral Urgency of Mental Health by lhuser123 on Monday November 27, 2017 @10:14PM (#15793986)
Yeah, a trivial engineering problem, what could possibly go wrong?.

I wonder which are those other cost-effective ways to improve access to care you refer to...

Re:The Moral Urgency of Mental Health by aaavl2821 on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @01:31AM (#15794929)
Was probably aggressive to characterize it as "trivial"

Some examples of cost effective interventions include better mental health and substance abuse treatment in primary care (methadone tx for example), integration of medical and behavioral health reimbursement and relaxing some onerous rules like not being able to bull for medical and behavioral services on the same day (though I think this is improving), better training and supervision for mental health professionals, more rigorous research into group therapy, Better education on psychiatric meds for PCPs, more follow up etc