New cognitive science tool to shed light on mental health

I see other people in the comments saying that this might be used to limit people's rights. I don't view that as a good reason to not pursue this research.

We have existing legal frameworks for ensuring people's rights are protected. Doctors can't just kidnap someone, courts are involved. In many cases those rights and protections should be strengthened.

The fact that those protections and frameworks aren't perfect shouldn't stop doctors and medical researchers from doing their job, which is to treat patients.

Even if it turns out not to be the perfect solution, it might turn out that this kind of measurement might be useful for things like estimating the effectiveness of medication and other medical interventions, or even lifestyle changes. Imagine if this kind of thing could be turned into a medical device. Many people who end up committing suicide have had previous suicidal episodes. Being able to have a technology that people with known suicidal tendencies can use to help keep tabs on their own mental health could potentially be as useful to them as blood sugar monitoring is to diabetics.

> I think the problem is, what good does it do if someone has some predilection toward suicide but isn't aware of it? If they were going to be resistant to addressing it without this tool, why would they be less resistant to it with it?

(Not a researcher in this area, but someone who's dealt with depression) this is a big concern of mine, and it doesn't seem different from the issues with a standard lie detector. A depressed person can feel fine one day and not the next. If we think of things like anhedonia, grief, guilt, etc they aren't constant day to day. A lot of suicides are preventable simply by getting a person through a day or two. This is the number one reason I'd argue for waiting periods on pistols (most gun deaths are suicides btw). Would such an event even show up on this device? Timing becomes an extremely important factor here. My understanding too is that we still don't even know how these diseases function from a chemical level in the brain (norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin). Categorically there can be: too much, not enough, broken uptake mechanism; and our main treatments are with reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs or SSNRIs) and these tools are really limited in those categories (which are very high level fwiw and need to be broken down substantially more to target good drug delivery).

I am also very concerned about how this technology can be abused. While I agree that there can be a lot of uses to it, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned with how it can be abused.

I think you are overstating the predictive power. You can find strong correlations looking backwards, but that doesn't mean that they are good or strong predictors looking forward.

To take just one of your data points as an example, 78% of suicides were preceded by a stressor. If you flip it to make a prediction, what percentage of Life stressors lead to suicide? The number of people who experience major life stressors must be enormous. If tens or hundreds of millions people have major stressors a year, that doesn't help you very much in targeting limited services .

The same holds true for psychiatric care. Prior suicide attempt is probably the exception there, but even that int ~30% predictive power looking foward.

I meant more immediate warning signs, like giving away personal possessions or sudden happiness.

When my friend killed himself, it both was and wasn’t a surprise. On one hand, he had a whole host of risk factors that everyone knew about. In the other hand, he’d gotten therapy and meds and seemed to be doing much better. His texts seemed normal. I’d even taken a training called “mental health first aid” - I knew that if I saw any signs I should ask him directly if he was thinking of suicide.

If there had been a magical way to know that he was in a period of high risk, there are a million things that could have been done besides in-patient. As one example, he had many friends who would have been by his side 24/7 (as had been done when we knew he wasn’t doing well).

I’m extremely skeptical that a technology like this could have worked and detected what was going on with him. I’m even more skeptical that the military would use it in an appropriate way. But still, I do see a glimmer of hope in it.

Of course, the obvious solution and the one that should be higher on everyone’s priority list is to simply stop sending soldiers into wars, stop letting parents get away with beating the shit out of their kids, and stop covering up rape. Unfortunately the mind reading machine is probably more likely to actually get done.

Just to add, I hear what you’re saying about how the hard part is preventing suicide more so than identifying risk. That lines up with what I’ve seen. I don’t think that negates the need to work on both problems.

People make assumptions about new policy based on their experience or knowledge on previous policy.

This tool could be lifesaving. This tool could also be for oppression. It's valid to question the potentially harmful uses of any medical tool and the policy that surrounds them (see opioids as an example).