Challenges for Artificial Intelligence in Recognizing Mental Disorders

Artificial Intelligence (AI) appears to be making important advances in the prediction and diagnosis of mental disorders. Researchers have used visual, acoustic, verbal, and physiological features to train models to predict or aid in the diagnosis, with some success. However, such systems are rarely applied in clinical practice, mainly because of the many challenges that currently exist. First, mental disorders such as depression are highly subjective, with complex symptoms, individual differences, and strong socio-cultural ties, meaning that their diagnosis requires comprehensive consideration. Second, there are many problems with the current samples, such as artificiality, poor ecological validity, small sample size, and mandatory category simplification. In addition, annotations may be too subjective to meet the requirements of professional clinicians. Moreover, multimodal information does not solve the current challenges, and within-group variations are greater than between-group characteristics, also posing significant challenges for recognition. In conclusion, current AI is still far from effectively recognizing mental disorders and cannot replace clinicians’ diagnoses in the near future. The real challenge for AI-based mental disorder diagnosis is not a technical one, nor is it wholly about data, but rather our overall understanding of mental disorders in general.