Republished from U of U Health.
Mental health problems are one of the most common causes of disability, affecting more than a billion people worldwide. Addressing mental health issues can pose extraordinarily difficult challenges: What can providers do to help people in the most precarious situations? How do changes in the physical brain affect our thoughts and experiences? And ultimately, how can everyone get the care they need?
Answering these questions was the common goal of researchers who participated in the Mental Health, Brain and Behavioral Sciences Research Day in September at the University of Utah. Although the problems they faced were serious, the new solutions they began to develop could ultimately help improve mental health care at individual and societal levels.
“We are building something for which there is no model,” said Mark RapaportMD, CEO of the Huntsman Mental Health Institute. “We are developing new and sustainable ways to solve some of the most difficult problems we face in society. »
The diverse approaches required to improve mental health care were reflected in the themes of the day.
AI and mental health
Artificial intelligence (AI)-based analysis could radically change mental health care by detecting patterns in large amounts of information, flagging people at highest risk of mental health problems to enable better preventive care.
Nina de Lacy, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine (SFESOM), uses AI to determine which social factors can predict mental health problems in advance.
Christopher Gregg, Ph.D., professor of neurobiology at SFESOM, zooms in on patient video data to analyze facial expressions and gestures, ideally to make diagnoses and predict risks on a large scale.
Guest speaker Eric Achtyes, MD, professor and chair of psychiatry at Western Michigan University, sounded a note of caution, saying that while technology has great potential to provide people with better mental health care , AI tools can fail unpredictably and must be accompanied by expert human involvement.
The brain at work
Other researchers have looked at mental health by studying how our brain functions and malfunctions.
Randall Peterson, Ph.D., dean of the College of Pharmacy (COP), explained how his lab is working to find better medications for mental health conditions such as opioid addiction by using high-throughput testing in zebrafish to analyze hundreds of compounds per day.
Bia DePaula-Silva, Ph.D., assistant professor of pharmacology and toxicology at COP, is learning how viral infections of the brain can lead to epilepsy, a common and incurable neurological disorder.
Emily Dennis, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurology at SFESOM, studies how head trauma causes long-term changes in brain anatomy.
Cory Inman, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, uses an advanced mobile brain imaging device to observe how memories are created in the real world.
Ethics and society
Mental health research is inextricably linked to societal and ethical issues, which have been the focus of attention for many speakers.
Lynn Maxfield, Ph.D., associate professor of vocology at the School of Music, and Rebecca Zarate, Ph.D., associate dean for research at the College of Fine Arts, are studying the impact of performing arts participation on mental health, with a particular focus on how group performances or the presence of an audience more wide could change things.
Zoe Robbins, DNP, assistant clinical professor in the College of Nursing, presented a model for connecting rural patients to mental health services through telehealth and an academic practice model.
Brent Kious, MD, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry, spoke on the ethical questions linked to psychiatry in very serious cases.
James Tabery, Ph.D., professor of philosophy in the College of Humanities, traced Utah’s history of sterilization of people with intellectual disabilities without their consent, from the explicitly eugenic practices of the 1920s to current state law that continues to legalize forced sterilization.
The wide range of discussions reinforced the belief that mental health is an extremely serious and complex problem, which will require the dedication of researchers from all areas of the health sciences and beyond.
