As you may know, Artificial Intelligence—or AI, has been gradually working its way into our lives more and more over time. Although AI has its risks of negatively impacting businesses or individuals in general, it has also been proven to be beneficial in regards to discovering mental health issues in people.

Starting in Britain and beginning to work its way to the U.S, an AI tool from Limbic, an AI startup company, has analyzed “…more than 210,000 patients with a claimed 93% accuracy…” (Axios).

This tool can either begin screening a person through text or audio and spot patterns in the individual’s words that match up with certain mental health diagnoses such as depression and anxiety. Every “…4 in 5 patients consented to be screened using the tool—far exceeding a pre-study estimate that only 1 in 4 would consent” (Axios).

Although this concept could save large amounts of time regarding waitlists and screening times, there is still a concern of how to bring this new method into clinics without overwhelming patients with fairly new technology.

To reassure these concerns, clinics will not be allowing full speech analysis from AI technology just yet. Until then, we still have this technology to make the lives of clinicians and patients much easier. Hopefully this discovery allows patients to be under a lessened amount of stress when testing for their own mental illnesses, as well as clinicians being given a larger amount of time to focus on diagnosing and treating each patient thoroughly. As you can see, AI has extreme potential to develop into something great.