A Participatory Approach to AI for Mental Health

Abstract

This virtual (online), one-day workshop addresses the sociotechnical issues in healthcare AI/ML that are idiosyncratic to mental health. Mental illness is the complex product of biological, psychological and social factors that foreground issues of under-representation, institutional and societal inequalities, bias and intersectionality in determining the outcomes for people affected by these disorders – the very same priorities that AI/ML fairness has begun to attend to in the past few years. Despite the history of impoverished material investment in mental health globally, in the past decade, research practices in mental health have begun to embrace patient and citizen activism (if at times, imperfectly) and the field has emphasised stakeholder (patients and public) participation as a central and absolutely necessary component of basic, translational and implementation science.

This positions mental healthcare as something of an exemplar of participatory practices in healthcare from which technologists, engineers and scientists can learn. For example, mental illness is largely expressed in language and behaviour such that the primary clinical tool is the interview and therefore patients’ data is predominantly collected as free-text clinical narratives. Furthermore, sensitive patient characteristics (e.g. ethnicity, sexual orientation and identity) are poorly recorded for reasons including clinician and institutions’ transcultural illiteracy which leads to biased data.

Uniquely, this workshop will invite and bring together practitioners and researchers rarely found together “in the same room”, including: under-represented groups with special interest in mental health and illness; psychiatry; psychology; allied mental health professions; technologists; scientists and engineers from the machine learning communities.

We have a limited number of sponsored tickets/places available for people who would not normally attend NeurIPS or where attending would present a financial burden. Please register your interest in these sponsored tickets by clicking here.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of Akrivia Health in providing this financial support and sponsorship for the workshop.

Please note, the workshop takes place at US Central Standard Time (GMT minus 6 hours). That means, if you’re attending from e.g. the United Kingdom, the workshop will run from 14:30 through to 23:30 GMT on 9th December 2022.

Julia Hamer-Hunt

Patient and Public Involvement Lead

I work within the Department of Psychiatry and the Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre to promote patient and public involvement and engagement (PPI/E) in research.

Dan W Joyce

Clinical Research Fellow

My research explores how computational methods can be used to improve personalisation of care for patients with mental illness

Andrey Kormilitzin

Senior Researcher

My research is centred around translating advances in mathematics, statistical machine learning and deep learning to address challenges involved in learning, inference and ethical decision making using complex biomedical and health data.