What we lack for mental health- observability and integration
Finished Thomas Insel's Healing around a week ago.
My biggest takeaway- mental health care has many problems, and there are a few key areas to work on:
- Observability: We need objective methods of tracking a person's mental health. One proposed method is using digital phenotyping- e.g. tracking a person's phone usage over time and running evaluations on that.
- End to end care: Mental health care is extremely fragmented- we often need a holistic care from all partners including counsellors, social workers, psychiatrists and family members. Having a single point of care is not sufficient. I'm very grateful that this is the model that we tend more to in Singapore.
- Better diagnosis: DSM5's framework is based on symptoms, not underlying issues. Imagining diagnosing someone with chest pain without noticing if it's a chest strain, cancer or heart attack. Unfortunately, this is where mental health diagnosis is now. A huge part is because we do not have good observations of the brain over time. The current thesis is that mental illness stems from poor intra-brain networks rather than defect in a specific region. As such, if we can rewire the brain, we can improve mental health as well.
I'll continue reading on this field; I'm also extremely interested in digital phenotyping especially as recent advances in LLMs can help to process all this data natively on a person's phone.
