The last few years have seen a renewed emphasis given to the scale and depth of society’s mental health problems.  This exposure has gone a small way to remove some of the stigma associated with the issue,  but it’s perhaps fair to say that difficulties remain, especially in the workplace.

This can prohibit people from speaking up about any problems they may be encountering.  A new study from the University of Tsukuba, in Japan, suggests that artificial intelligence may be able to play a role.

The research highlights the use of AI to detect signs of depression could do a better job than the questionnaire-based approach that is often used to screen for mental health issues today, not least because people often fail to answer those questionnaires truthfully.

“We wanted to see if the AI system could detect psychological distress in a large population from sociodemographic, lifestyle, and sleep factors, without data about subjective states, such as mood,” the researchers say.

Detecting depression

The researchers first asked volunteers from an office-based firm to complete a survey about their lifestyle, sleep, and various other sociodemographic factors.  They used this to develop an AI-based model to better predict psychological distress, with the model compared with predictions made by 6 psychiatrists.

“The results were surprising,” the researchers explain. “We found that even without data about mood, the AI model and the team of psychiatrists produced similar predictions regarding moderate psychological distress.”

What’s more, the volunteers who recorded severe psychological distress were generally among those for whom the AI-based model was not only particularly accurate, but more accurate than the psychiatrists.

“This newly developed model appears to easily be able to predict psychological distress among large numbers of workers, without data regarding their subjective mood,” the researchers continue. “This effectively avoids the issue of social stigma concerning mental health in the workplace, and eliminates the risk of inappropriate responses to questions asking about respondents’ mood.”

As a result, the researchers believe that their work illustrates how screening tools don’t require us to report our subjective mood, and may even be more accurate as a result of this.  They hope that it might trigger earlier interventions to help us to better overcome depression and other forms of psychological distress.