Can Artificial Intelligence play a role in the diagnosis and treatment of mental health problems? The search for the answer to this question leads a group of psychiatrists to meet this Friday and Saturday, in Bragança.
The meeting is organized by the Alentejo Psychiatric Association, which chose the virtuality of reality as its theme, giving rise to a two-day meeting in the city of Trás-os-Montes.
Joana Raposo Gomes, psychiatrist and one of the organizers, believes that current psychiatry cannot ignore the contribution of technology to the well-being of patients.
“In our reality we invite virtuality to enter. We already have what reality is or what has become our reality of intervention in mental illness, in psychiatric illness, we already have that reality, but we also already have reality of technologies within mental health. and within the areas of diagnosis, treatment, relapse prevention,” he explains, in statements to TSFhighlighting that technology is already part of the “new reality.”
“We have already brought that reality that we knew in the past, which is now our new reality, which now brings virtuality,” he insists.
The psychiatrist affirms that, in Portugal, the use of technology in this area is no longer unknown to mental health professionals, nor to patients. They are two worlds that are increasingly closer.
“One of the things that has been talked about the most lately and that has flooded our daily lives is ChatGPT. People started using it, started talking to ChatGPT, started realizing that, like a chatbot, it gives advice, simulates the behavior of the human being and people began to use it even for self-knowledge and to seek clarification about what they felt, about what was happening and it is something that is very easy to access,” he says.
Joana Raposo Gomes highlights that “there is a democratization in the accessibility of these new technologies” and maintains that it is possible to avoid any risk of dehumanization of mental health care precisely through the use of these devices.
“As much as these artificial intelligence algorithms simulate human behavior, they are also at the mercy of the will, in principle, of those who program them and with this more complex issues can arise,” he says, adding that, “as much as artificial intelligence artificial wants it, it lacks creativity and the empathy that a therapist will have with his patients.
“It is essential that, along with this currently exponential development, mental health professionals, that is, psychiatrists, psychologists, work together with these programmers, engineers and game designers so that tools with safer applicability emerge,” he highlights.
Source: TSF
