Community over Computers?

Artificial intelligence is already everywhere.

In small yet significant ways, artificial intelligence (AI) has been changing the lights at traffic signals, dispatching our emails, personalising ads on our social media platforms, analysing large datasets, setting us up on romantic dates, and driving our cars.

Since the 1960s, cyberneticians and speculative fiction writers have been battling over the role of machines, machine learning, and all of AI in people’s lives. One side predicts that machines will be smarter than people, and the other side prophesies gloom and doom on the easy adoption of these newfangled technologies. As with most human histories, decidedly staying on one or the other side of the debate never seems to answer any of these questions entirely.

However, the swift introduction of large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Anthropic’s Claude, among others, has heralded a transformation in lived human experience in our contemporary world. It must be acknowledged, and we must wrestle with it.

With a little help from my AI friends

In this upcoming second edition of Manotsava, “a first-of-its-kind National Mental Health Festival” designed to “spark dialogue, build community, and make mental health research accessible to all,” topics ranging from artificial intelligence to workplace burnout, from sexuality and masculinity to the gut-brain connection, and more, will be tackled over two days through panels, workshops, sharing circles, and live performances.

Luru spoke to two panelists from the “Code and Care: Navigating Chatbots, Apps, and the Future of Health” discussion to understand the role of these ubiquitous technologies in the sphere of mental health.

“It’s a very, very helpful tool for the future, and there are a lot of ways it can be leveraged right now, but it isn’t ready to replace human companionship or expertise at this stage,” says Dr Amit Malik, founder and CEO of Amaha, a mental health organisation. But in his own context of “running clinics across Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, a hospital in Bengaluru, and working with 250 full-time mental health providers,” he finds himself leveraging AI for backend and operations tasks.

At his organisation, AI is used for “client-to-clinician matching, to help with transcription, client follow-ups, activity engagement within sessions,” and other similar tasks that streamline its clinician services. “And these administrative uses of AI in mental health aren’t different from its use cases in other industries,” he adds. He is clear: “We don’t use AI for front-end, client therapeutic support. For us, it is crucial that the clinician is the only one making the therapeutic recommendations to the client,” he stresses, “because there’s a difference between what a therapist actually does versus a chatbot or app validating or reflecting one’s needs. In therapy, one is questioned, supported, challenged, helped with context, given time to reflect, and equipped to come up with one’s own frameworks — there’s a range of things that a good clinician provides.”

AI am always learning

Industry and innovation are listening and actively working to respond to these lags and misses. Manaswini Pai, portfolio manager at Social Alpha, supports founders from “the whiteboard stage to building a full-fledged solution.” The not-for-profit helps these innovators validate their ideas for clinical utility and test them in smaller pilots before they can be deployed at scale. So, she understands the concerns around these new models of care. She speaks to the fear “that technology, while democratising, may not bridge the need for human touch in care,” especially in a sector like mental health.

“And yes, it does miss out on the vulnerability that people approach it with,” she says on the larger picture of AI and generative AI. Can technology address this lacuna? Through her work at Social Alpha, Manaswini believes it can. “We think of building technologies with the secret sauce of insights from the ground. We ask questions: what’s actually happening versus what is being built. Is it really helping the system or disrupting and complicating [it] further? We try to bridge the gap between the market and academia through our support, including [the] capital that we provide,” she answers.

“The core focus of Social Alpha is science, so our work is centred around overall brain health and neuroscience,” she explains. She refers to AI innovations that allow for the “personalisation of non-invasive brain stimulation, which works alongside therapy and medication to reduce recovery time. Virtual reality is adopted to help with visualisation to overcome things like social anxiety and manage memory training for [persons] with dementia; AI-based platforms can now interpret EEG or imaging-based scans  to assist in diagnosis, while biotech products enable early identification of disorders.”

She’s firm that “innovations need to reach the care providers within the system.” AI and technology aren’t “meant to remove the care providers but rather to enable them and share their workload,” she says. She clarifies that although we all hear some stories of AI interventions in the mental health sector, there are others that we miss. “The National Institute for Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) is working towards building capacity through their district programmes and the nascent telehealth programme under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, which is trying to make healthcare infrastructure remotely accessible to all,” she says. “It’s important to integrate mental healthcare into primary care so that people have access to it.”

People versus platforms

Human intervention is the ingredient X in this mix. “When using AI, we add our own layer of judgement and are more discerning in how we act. But if one is in a vulnerable mental state, then one might not, at that moment in time, have the capability [for discernment], and that’s the tricky part,” Amit offers. Manaswini echoes this position: “Anything as sensitive as these technologies shouldn’t be given to a person in a vulnerable state.” Her concerns are that companies using AI shouldn’t just be handing out these platforms, “but also giving the dashboard to counsellors and care providers to keep track of all the queries on the platform.” She understands that this doesn’t solve the problem, “but it is a start to building guardrails into this technology.” And she hopes that rather than receiving backlash, in this contemporary landscape — “where empathy and innovation must coexist” — the goal of technology will not be to replace care “but [to] make it more human, accessible, affordable, and informed.”

The details: Manostava 2025 takes place on 8 & 9 November at the Lalit Ashok, Kumara Krupa High Grounds. It is open & free to all; register here.