On August 26 at 16:00, Anna will defend her dissertation, titled The Future of Psychiatric Diagnostics: Philosophical Reflections on Artificial Intelligence and Mental Health Care at Utrecht University.
Description:
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to detect diseases that remain invisible to human clinicians. But can these same technologies be applied to psychiatry? Is depression a disease in the same way as cancer? Unlike most of medicine, psychiatry
lacks well-established biological disease mechanisms. This uncertainty shapes the kinds of AI models that can be developed, what they can predict, and what they can ultimately tell us about mental disorders. This dissertation explores the landscape of data-driven diagnostic models in mental healthcare through the lens of the philosophy of science and of ethics. It distinguishes between models that predict-, models that control-, and models that aim to explain psychiatric phenomena, arguing that these different approaches rely on different
assumptions and should therefore be evaluated by different standards. Across a series of conceptual analyses, it examines supervised machine learning, behavioural prediction models based on digital phenotyping, unsupervised clustering techniques, network models of psychopathology, and complexity-theoretical approaches to mental disorders. The dissertation argues that predictive accuracy alone is insufficient for responsible clinical implementation. Instead, different AI models should be understood as serving different epistemic and clinical functions, each with their own benefits, limitations, and ethical challenges. Building on this analysis, it develops a philosophical framework for evaluating AI in psychiatry that integrates scientific validity with ethical considerations such as privacy, bias, explainability and clinical usefulness. In doing so, the dissertation offers both a conceptual map of the field of AI in mental healthcare and practical guidance for the development of ethical AI technologies.
Registration:
In case you are interested in attending the defense (either online or in person), we would like to request you to fill out the following save-the-date form: https://forms.gle/WbDrAFjbkZaXtZGL6. We will then send you the official invitation with all further details.
We hope to see you there and to celebrate Anna's defense together! In case you have any questions, please contact Caroline (cjmbollen@gmail.com) and Céline (celineevianne@gmail.com).