Improving Mental Health with AI
Improving mental health through AI
As we kick off the holiday season this week with Thanksgiving in the US and Black Friday everywhere it’s important to recognize that this time of year can be more stressful on many. In fact, according to the American Psychological Association, 38% of people surveyed stated that stress increased during the holidays due to time and financial pressures, gift giving and family gatherings. With our mental health providers already stretched by a populace stressed by pandemic and economic concerns, I was curious about what our industry was doing to help. This is when I discovered the team at Lyssn (pronounced listen).
Lyssn was formed in 2017 by a group of psychologists and engineers keen to apply artificial intelligence to improve the quality of therapy and assist practitioners. The underlying technology was born out of a study on AI training of therapists funded by the NIH, but researchers realized they were onto something that could have meaningful application for both public mental health resources and private sector clinics.
One thing that struck me about this company in particular was that the leadership were actually former practitioners themselves making them both better apt to identify the parameters for algorithm training and the mindset for practitioner adoption. In fact, Lyssn co-founder Zac Imel, continues as a professor of counseling psychology at the University of Utah in addition to his responsibilities at the company. Our discussion covered the interesting journey of Lyssn since its foundation, how AI is a resource for therapeutic practice, not a replacement for human-to-human engagement, and how state and local governments and clinics across the nation have signed up for Lyssn solutions.
Listen to the episode to hear how Zac and other researchers trained their models specifically for the therapeutic environment and how AI has evolved in this short time to provide more robust assistance to practitioners tapping natural language processing, to analyze conversations in real time and make recommendations for improving the quality and outcome of the therapy experience. I hope you find this application of AI as inspirational as I did as you consider the real-world impact driven through adoption. Thanks for engaging and Happy Thanksgiving - Allyson
Improving mental health through AI
As we kick off the holiday season this week with Thanksgiving in the US and Black Friday everywhere it’s important to recognize that this time of year can be more stressful on many. In fact, according to the American Psychological Association, 38% of people surveyed stated that stress increased during the holidays due to time and financial pressures, gift giving and family gatherings. With our mental health providers already stretched by a populace stressed by pandemic and economic concerns, I was curious about what our industry was doing to help. This is when I discovered the team at Lyssn (pronounced listen).
Lyssn was formed in 2017 by a group of psychologists and engineers keen to apply artificial intelligence to improve the quality of therapy and assist practitioners. The underlying technology was born out of a study on AI training of therapists funded by the NIH, but researchers realized they were onto something that could have meaningful application for both public mental health resources and private sector clinics.
One thing that struck me about this company in particular was that the leadership were actually former practitioners themselves making them both better apt to identify the parameters for algorithm training and the mindset for practitioner adoption. In fact, Lyssn co-founder Zac Imel, continues as a professor of counseling psychology at the University of Utah in addition to his responsibilities at the company. Our discussion covered the interesting journey of Lyssn since its foundation, how AI is a resource for therapeutic practice, not a replacement for human-to-human engagement, and how state and local governments and clinics across the nation have signed up for Lyssn solutions.
Listen to the episode to hear how Zac and other researchers trained their models specifically for the therapeutic environment and how AI has evolved in this short time to provide more robust assistance to practitioners tapping natural language processing, to analyze conversations in real time and make recommendations for improving the quality and outcome of the therapy experience. I hope you find this application of AI as inspirational as I did as you consider the real-world impact driven through adoption. Thanks for engaging and Happy Thanksgiving - Allyson
