Can AI Make Vulnerable Girls Happier?

Praekelt.org
Jul 25, 2017 · 4 min read
Two adolescent girls in a town outside of Bangalore

Praekelt.org works with millions of adolescent girls in low and middle income countries, where mental health is the number one cause of disability or illness and the third cause of death (World Health Organisation). When we engage with vulnerable girls, we are working with some of the world’s most susceptible to depression.

We also have millions of new mothers in our maternal health programmes, and we know that in low and middle income countries globally, 25% of these moms will experience antepartum depression and 20% postpartum depression (Harvard School of Public Health).

As part of our work with Girl Effect, Springster which is available for free through Free Basics by Facebook for adolescent girls in 65 low or middle income countries globally, we help girls learn about depression by providing them with stories from girls who have experienced the illness. For example, we have articles on the South African site like Depression Sucks, Suddenly Sad , or Kakakku Depresi in Indonesia. We also signpost girls to national support services where they exist in our priority markets: Indonesia, Philippines, South Africa and Nigeria. Similarly in our adolescent sexual and reproductive health programme, Tuneme.org, (available in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland and Malawi) we provide educational articles on depression and users respond sharing their own experiences. In this way, users can directly share their stories and find resources applicable to them.

In South Africa, the National Department of Health’s MomConnect and NurseConnect programmes both contain messaging on depression. For messaging targeted at moms we explore postpartum depression, encouraging mothers to seek support at their local clinics if they recognise any symptoms. For nurses we have an entire section that covers all types of mental illnesses and directs nurses to the South African Depression and Anxiety Group for further support.

While we’ve made a start to addressing these issues by providing general information on depression to our end users, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we could do more to leverage these large-scale mobile platforms and new technologies to make people happier.

I recently attended a panel at CogX London, an international conference on the impact of artificial intelligence on different industries, addressing the impact of AI on Mental Health.

“Artificial Intelligence is taking huge steps in the diagnosis of depression and schizophrenia, better than humans.” Silja Litvin, Psychologist, CEO & Founder of PsycApps Digital Mental Health shared. PsychApps is one of the many evidence-based apps for depression available in an increasingly saturated market. A Google Play search will leave you with hundreds of options covering self-diagnosis, cognitive behavioural therapy, counseling and support and mindfulness and meditation. But they are only catching those that are health-seeking. We are not supporting the vast number of girls and women who do not yet recognise they are suffering from a mental illness, or those who have no access to clinical support services near them.

Could we detect the severity of depression in our users and deliver customised content to those at higher risk of suicide or depression? Research says we can. Dr Maria Liakata, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, has been using natural language processing to identify sentiment and emotions in text, monitoring patterns of vocabulary use and syntax as well as interaction in dialogue to automatically classify mental health conditions. While the current research has been done on depression-related forums, they are working towards auto-detection in any written or spoken text. The use cases are endless.

We are also yet to see AI tackle high-level psychology successfully. Trained psychologists are still best for that and they are in short supply. Dr Nick Taylor, CEO & Clinical Psychologist at Unmind, knows this all too well. He spent 10 years in under resourced NHS mental health services. He is now focused on improving mental health at work with Unmind. He sees the potential of AI to identify high-risk patients and play a triage role. As Andrew Tarver, Founder of Jigsaw, identified that the user’s trust is key in making an impact on mental health. Trust is created through credibility, reliability and understanding.

Another gap is around the use of language. Current AI mental health apps and bots are missing at least one of these characteristics. Many current chatbots are getting some of the fundamentals wrong. For example, they do not use the same language as the patient. A patient may say they are feeling anxious, but the bot may respond that it’s sorry they are feeling stressed.

Each mental health patient is different, although they share common symptoms. AI needs to detect not just the presence of certain behaviours but the deviation from the person’s norm. This is not an easy task. As Tarver says, “Life is hard. Mental health is hard. Instead of trying to solve mental health, try to make life a little bit better.”

There are many unanswered questions. But for me the most important is: can we make life a little bit happier for the millions of girls and women we work with? With the latest research in machine learning, data science and psychology, I believe we can.

Written by Pippa Yeats, Lead Service Designer, Praekelt.org

MobileForGood

Sharing stories and experiences to help leverage the power of mobile to improve people's wellbeing

Praekelt.org

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We use technology to solve some of the world's largest social problems. Follow our curated magazine MobileForGood. www.praekelt.org.

MobileForGood

Sharing stories and experiences to help leverage the power of mobile to improve people's wellbeing

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