Event Details:
LLM-based chatbot therapists, emotional support, and wellness applications have proliferated over the past few years, but there is not yet sufficient research evidence to support their use as mental health interventions. At the same time, many have recognized the need for greater access to mental health intervention and the difficulty of scaling human support. This is part 1 in a two-part series on the implications of LLM technology for mental health treatment. This month we will focus on whether LLM-based tools and generative AI more broadly has the capacity to emulate psychotherapy, including necessary elements and current capabilities. This panel will include insights from a psychiatrist, a clinical and computational psychologist, and a computer scientist about the research to date on LLM-based mental health tools, the current functionalities and limitations of LLMs and the implications for mental health intervention. In February, we will return with a panel to consider the ethical and philosophical implications of LLM-based therapy.
Panelists:
Betsy Stade, PhD is a research scientist and associate director of the Stanford ALACRITY CREATE Center for Advancing Therapy with AI. As a computational clinical psychologist, Betsy focuses her research on how AI and large language models can be used for evidence-based psychological practice. Betsy did her graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania and her clinical residency at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, and is a licensed psychologist in California. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation.
John Torous, MD, MBI, is director of the digital psychiatry division in the Department of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a Harvard Medical School-affiliated teaching hospital, where he also serves as a staff psychiatrist and associate professor. He has a background in electrical engineering and computer sciences and received an undergraduate degree in the field from UC Berkeley before attending medical school at UC San Diego. He completed his psychiatry residency, fellowship in clinical informatics, and master's degree in biomedical informatics at Harvard. Dr. Torous is active in investigating the potential of mobile mental health and AI technologies for psychiatry, and his team supports mindapps.org as the largest database of mental health apps, mindApps.ai for benchmarking AI chatbots, mindLAMP technology platform for scalable digital phenotyping and interventions, and the Digital Navigator program to promote digital equity and access. Dr. Torous has published over 300 peer reviewed articles and 5 book chapters on the topic. He directs the Digital Psychiatry Clinic at BIDMC which seeks to improve access to and quality of mental health care through augmenting treatment with digital innovations. Dr. Torous serves as editor-in-chief for the journal JMIR Mental Health, web editor for JAMA Psychiatry, and a member of various American Psychiatric Association committees.
Andy Schwartz, PhD is a computer scientist and a leading expert in AI, natural language processing, and computational psychology. He leads pioneering research that improves AI toward better understanding people, psychologically, drawing insights into human behavior, traits, and mental health. With a distinguished background as a former DARPA Young Faculty Awardee and co-founder of the World Well-Being Project, Schwartz leads the Human Language Analysis Lab. The lab team's work has been supported by NIH, NSF, Templeton Foundation, and DARPA. He has advised a variety of tech startups in their analytics infrastructure, and his work has been featured in more than 100 media outlets.
Moderator
Shannon Wiltsey Stirman, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and a Psychologist at the National Center for PTSD's Dissemination and Training Division. She is the co-Director of Stanford's CREATE Center. Areas of research emphasis include implementation science (particularly training, fidelity, adaptation and sustainment), evidence-based treatment for PTSD, depression, suicide prevention, and use of technology to support access to evidence-based mental health interventions. As a co-lead of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science's Mental Health Innovation and Technology Hub, she worked with a team at Stanford to develop Pause a Moment, a digital wellbeing program for healthcare workers who experience COVID-19 stressors (pam.stanford.edu). Most recently, she has been working on the use of Large Language Models to support evidence-based mental health interventions. She serves on the leadership committee of Stanford's AI for Mental Health Initiative.