Artificial Intelligence A cost effective solution to improve mental health care in India

According to the National Health Survey of 2015 - 16, 150 million people in India are in urgent need of mental health treatment, both short term and long term. The number of psychologists and psychiatrists per 1,00,000 of the Indian population abysmally low, merely 0.07 and 0.3 respectively.

The District Mental Health Program (DMHP), though a noble initiative, is struggling with understaffed centres and lack of funds, thus arresting its ability to undertake expansion. As with every social welfare scheme, scalability continues to be a major issue for the DMHP program.

The answer to this may lie in the latest buzzword that has been doing the rounds in the country, namely Artificial Intelligence (AI).

With the stress of the Central Government in the interim budget to establish a National Artificial Intelligence Center, India has never been better placed to utilize AI to assist those suffering from mental illnesses.

Anxiety, depression and schizophrenia are insidious diseases that are indiscriminate in their attack on every age group. Evidence suggests that the number of mentally ill patients in India will only increase in the coming decades. The invisibility of it further complicates the situation, especially in rural India, where the belief that such conditions are a result of evil eye or black magic is pervasive. Urban India performs better, but only marginally since it too faces the problem of therapy being prohibitively expensive and socially stigmatized. The lack of awareness about mental illnesses, especially at the workplace, often leads to the belief that the employee can’t be entrusted with any job responsibility. This is precisely the reason why insurance coverage or paid leave is rarely provided to mentally ill patients. The prevalent belief that will power can help mentally ill patients are as good as proposing that optimism can make appendicitis, or any other biological disease disappears.

India might just find its solution in an initiative that began way back in the 1960s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The rudimentary AI based chatbot called “ELIZA” was able to simulate a short conversation between a therapist and a patient and is the godparent of such systems used today. AI-based systems have come a long way since then and India, which is among the top performers in AI innovations, might be able to leverage its burgeoning AI ecosystem to build virtual therapists, accessible even to those living in remote corners of the country. National initiatives on natural language processing and popularity of smartphones, especially in rural areas mean that AI app-based services can be easily provided to mental health patients who have so far, been ostracized. An integrated network of chatbots with therapists and psychiatrists to remotely monitor the progress of the patient might be a good starting point for seeking treatment for such diseases.