Jenna Sauber, a Washington, D.C. resident, has tried both online and traditional therapy.
For years, Jenna Sauber took advantage of traditional therapy, setting an appointment with a mental health professional to help her through various life and relationship issues.
"The traditional model of therapy suffers from access barriers that keep enormous numbers of people from getting the care they need."
But when Sauber, 33, needed help extricating herself from a friendship that was becoming toxic, she tried another route of therapy. Life was getting busy for the communications professional from Washington D.C., and Sauber decided it was time to try something new – signing up for an online therapy smartphone app.
She isn't the only one trying therapy on-the-go. The online mental health industry has been booming in recent years, and technology companies – even giants such as Apple and Google – are sensing an opportunity to serve a market that wants to tend to their mental health wherever they are. Some are even tapping virtual reality used with a smartphone to help fight alcohol and nicotine addiction.
For those seeking a sympathetic ear – or text – companies such as Woebot offer a mental health chatbot to help patients relieve their anxiety or depression. Other companies, like Better Help and Talkspace, provide licensed mental health professionals who are available to connect with a patient throughout the day.
Recently, Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps became a brand ambassador for Talkspace after he disclosed his own struggle with depression.
Since Talkspace launched in 2012 by two psychologists, the company says it has worked with more than one million people seeking help.
How It Works
Potential clients fill out a questionnaire, detailing their mental health needs, and are connected with a professional whose specialties align with those needs. Basic text messaging packages are often offered by online therapy companies, as well as live-conversation packages and couples therapy. The average cost of these packages can vary and is usually billed weekly, with the ability to discontinue at any time.
Dr. Neil Lieberman, the Chief Medical Officer of Talkspace, is a board-certified psychiatrist. His background includes the oversight of inmates with severe psychological issues. One of the biggest advantages of online therapy, he says, is its accessibility. More than 70 percent of Talkspace users have never before been in therapy.
"It's a promising, but largely untested way to receive care."
"The traditional model of therapy – brick-and-mortar, 45-minute sessions – suffers from access barriers that keep enormous numbers of people from getting the care they need," Dr. Lieberman says. "Talkspace makes it possible for people to enjoy all the benefits of traditional therapy for a fraction of the cost, and without the need to schedule an appointment, travel to an office or get time off work."
Is It Effective?
This industry, while fast-growing, is still young. Psychiatric professionals are still trying to gauge its success, and whether it's providing the support its clients seek.
Dr. Vaile Wright, a licensed psychologist and the director of research and special projects with the American Psychological Association, says there isn't a lot of research available regarding online therapy.
"It's a promising, but largely untested way to receive care," says Wright.
She describes a spectrum of online therapy-type products available to consumers, ranging from meditation apps to videoconferencing services with a live therapist.
"There may be someone who doesn't necessarily need a mental health diagnosis but could use the mindfulness app to really feel more centered. What we generally see and what we think is probably effective is the use of these apps in conjunction or as an adjunct to a face-to-face ongoing relationship."
The APA offers a set of guidelines for professionals and for consumers that highlight issues that potential patients should consider before choosing online therapy, along with research material and other sources for help, depending on the condition.
There are still a lot of unknowns about online therapy, including potential security, confidentiality, privacy laws, and emergency situations, Wright says. "Consumers do need to be aware of that."
Lieberman says that the Talkspace app and website is encrypted to protect information. The company has also been certified as HIPAA compliant, meaning that the company must have a system in place to protect patient information.
"We take privacy, security, and confidentiality very seriously," he says.
For Sauber and her problematic friendship, online therapy was ultimately a let-down.
"She was very nice," Sauber says of her app therapist. "She would check in twice a day, once during the day and then at night. I'd type out what was going on and she would chime in that night or the next morning. It wasn't truly real-time unless you happened to be online with her window. I found that I was typing in huge paragraphs of what was happening and then me waiting for her to respond." Eventually, Sauber left the friendship on her own and quit the app.
When she decided to get help for sleeping issues last fall, she found her way back to a traditional therapist. And although her schedule was still tight, she was able to schedule FaceTime sessions with the therapist, which helped. The sleep issues, she felt, required a relationship with a live therapist who could notice how her body was responding to stressors.
Wright says that the live aspect of traditional therapy can be instructive in guiding a patient's care.
"Being face-to-face allows a therapist to pick up on body language. Maybe a person looks away when they're talking about a particular topic, or somebody's affect doesn't match up with the content of what they're talking about. For example, they're talking about something that's traumatic and yet they're smiling. That kind of nuance can be lost in texts or even e-mails."
Still, Sauber said she could see the benefits of the apps for different types of personalities and situations.
"I can see it being helpful for people who may not be comfortable being in person with someone because they're shy or just uncomfortable about their body language or may be just better communicating behind a screen," she said.
As far as the future of this kind of therapy, Lieberman says that Talkspace is hard at work expanding its network of clinicians and investing in research and science. The company is also working to develop partnerships with employers and health plans to offer the service to more people.
"Our intention to is to make therapy – a profession we think can lead to meaningful change in anybody's life – as common as going to the dentist or hitting the gym."
"These technology-based approaches can supplement the face-to-face work that you do."
[Correction: An earlier version of this article mistakenly implied that the company Woebot offers licensed mental health professionals to speak with patients. Woebot offers a chatbot service, a fully automated conversational agent, to help patients with anxiety and depression.]
AI was integral to creating Moderna's mRNA vaccine against COVID.
But the truth is that before ChatGPT nabbed the public’s attention, AI was already here, and it was doing more important things than writing essays for lazy college students. Case in point: It was key to saving the lives of tens of millions of people.
AI-designed mRNA vaccines
As Dave Johnson, chief data and AI officer at Moderna, told MIT Technology Review‘s In Machines We Trust podcast in 2022, AI was integral to creating the company’s highly effective mRNA vaccine against COVID. Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech’s mRNA vaccines collectively saved between 15 and 20 million lives, according to one estimate from 2022.
Johnson described how AI was hard at work at Moderna, well before COVID arose to infect billions. The pharmaceutical company focuses on finding mRNA therapies to fight off infectious disease, treat cancer, or thwart genetic illness, among other medical applications. Messenger RNA molecules are essentially molecular instructions for cells that tell them how to create specific proteins, which do everything from fighting infection, to catalyzing reactions, to relaying cellular messages.
Johnson and his team put AI and automated robots to work making lots of different mRNAs for scientists to experiment with. Moderna quickly went from making about 30 per month to more than one thousand. They then created AI algorithms to optimize mRNA to maximize protein production in the body — more bang for the biological buck.
For Johnson and his team’s next trick, they used AI to automate science, itself. Once Moderna’s scientists have an mRNA to experiment with, they do pre-clinical tests in the lab. They then pore over reams of data to see which mRNAs could progress to the next stage: animal trials. This process is long, repetitive, and soul-sucking — ill-suited to a creative scientist but great for a mindless AI algorithm. With scientists’ input, models were made to automate this tedious process.
“We don’t think about AI in the context of replacing humans,” says Dave Johnson, chief data and AI officer at Moderna. “We always think about it in terms of this human-machine collaboration, because they’re good at different things. Humans are really good at creativity and flexibility and insight, whereas machines are really good at precision and giving the exact same result every single time and doing it at scale and speed.”
All these AI systems were in put in place over the past decade. Then COVID showed up. So when the genome sequence of the coronavirus was made public in January 2020, Moderna was off to the races pumping out and testing mRNAs that would tell cells how to manufacture the coronavirus’s spike protein so that the body’s immune system would recognize and destroy it. Within 42 days, the company had an mRNA vaccine ready to be tested in humans. It eventually went into hundreds of millions of arms.
Biotech harnesses the power of AI
Moderna is now turning its attention to other ailments that could be solved with mRNA, and the company is continuing to lean on AI. Scientists are still coming to Johnson with automation requests, which he happily obliges.
“We don’t think about AI in the context of replacing humans,” he told the Me, Myself, and AI podcast. “We always think about it in terms of this human-machine collaboration, because they’re good at different things. Humans are really good at creativity and flexibility and insight, whereas machines are really good at precision and giving the exact same result every single time and doing it at scale and speed.”
Moderna, which was founded as a “digital biotech,” is undoubtedly the poster child of AI use in mRNA vaccines. Moderna recently signed a deal with IBM to use the company’s quantum computers as well as its proprietary generative AI, MoLFormer.
Moderna’s success is encouraging other companies to follow its example. In January, BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer to make the other highly effective mRNA vaccine against COVID, acquired the company InstaDeep for $440 million to implement its machine learning AI across its mRNA medicine platform. And in May, Chinese technology giant Baidu announced an AI tool that designs super-optimized mRNA sequences in minutes. A nearly countless number of mRNA molecules can code for the same protein, but some are more stable and result in the production of more proteins. Baidu’s AI, called “LinearDesign,” finds these mRNAs. The company licensed the tool to French pharmaceutical company Sanofi.
Writing in the journal Accounts of Chemical Research in late 2021, Sebastian M. Castillo-Hair and Georg Seelig, computer engineers who focus on synthetic biology at the University of Washington, forecast that AI machine learning models will further accelerate the biotechnology research process, putting mRNA medicine into overdrive to the benefit of all.
This article originally appeared on Big Think, home of the brightest minds and biggest ideas of all time.
