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NLP Bots for Mental Health Counseling

Let us begin with some eye-catching facts. 1 in every 5 adults in America is facing a mental health issue. The youth’s mental health is worsening continuously due to the stress and anxiety that accompanies modern lifestyle and education systems. 12% of the young adults in America are facing clinical depression and anxiety. About 80% of these are left with no or insufficient treatment. Though these numbers are for the US, the story is similar in many other countries such as India, Japan etc. where the burden of education and work life is leading to increasing cases of depression and even suicide.



The following news articles show that the number of psychiatrists, compared to the rapidly increasing cases of mental health issues, is not satisfactory.


With the emerging trend of automation in the industry due to breathtaking research in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, can we imagine a world where our psychiatrists are highly advanced chatbots that understand a patient’s condition and try to assist him/her based on the communication with the patient using a natural language? In this article, I talk about the need and possibility of such chatbots in the real-world and also some projects and startup that are already making progress in this domain.
Deep learning has made many advancements including speech recognition, object recognition, and machine translation. Companies are using deep learning for many language--related tasks such as to improving searches, image captioning, and creating question--answering agents and assistants, like Facebook M, Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google's Assistant. Many of these Deep learning techniques are applicable to dialog systems.


An Indian startup called Touchkin is making products with a vision to “create a more mentally resilient and emotionally supported world”. Their product, Wysa, is an artificial intelligence based chat bot that uses evidence based therapies like Cognitive Behavior Therapy, which are suggested and approved by professional practicing counselors from the Touchkin team and a scientific advisory board comprising of leading mental health professionals from around the world. Wysa already has 75,000+ users with over 3 million conversations with its users. It has helped many of users to deal with depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. Touchkin has been backed by founders of some big Indian companies such as InMobi, TaxiForSure etc. which shows the interest of investors in such technologies that work towards a social cause.
Another such project working towards counselling of human beings using ML and Natural Language Processing is Carl - https://github.com/andrewt3000/carl_voice
Carl is a proposed project to train an autonomous agent to do text--based chat counseling. Live counselors chat with clients using reflective listening and record dialog data. This training data and machine learning train an increasingly autonomous agent capable of counseling clients. Carl is an acronym for computer assisted reflective listener, and an homage to Carl Rogers, the pioneer of reflective listening.




With the rising rates of mental health problems, there is a clear need of more psychiatrists in the world. Moreover, even if there are enough psychiatrists, the people suffering from depression and anxiety might not always feel comfortable opening up about their problems to other humans. This calls for research in making highly advanced chatbots that can empathize with users and help them much better than a human as they can be trained on an enormous amount of data from past cases / psychiatry sessions. Such trained bots can effectively and efficiently help mental health patients around the world. Moreover, people might even feel more comfortable confiding in a bot which is just a computer program that guarantees confidentiality of the user's data.
In a world where we see governments and companies using suicide helplines to help people in hard times, the usefulness of empathetic and highly intelligent chatbots cannot be overstated. With advancements in Natural Language Processing to the extent where bots can understand a human's emotions from his/her words, we can move towards a world where people with mental health issues feel safer and more connected.

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