The Case for Addressing Emotional Resilience in Graduate Student Training

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to review the evidence for addressing emotional resilience in the training of graduate students in communication sciences and disorders (CSD). As helping professionals, speech-language pathologists and audiologists face unique emotional challenges that can lead to burnout, compassion fatigue, and eventually possible career changes. At the same time, we also know that graduate students across the country, in all disciplines, are in the throes of a mental health crisis. Graduate students in CSD are, therefore, in need of targeted instruction on how to foster emotional resilience both to manage the stressors of graduate school and to ensure professional wellness and career longevity. Conclusions: While there is currently limited research evidence on how to effectively target emotional resilience for graduate students in CSD, existing research and guidance from studies in CSD and other helping professions can provide a framework to follow. The recent mental health challenges facing our nation, and graduate students more specifically, should be seen as both a call to action and an opportunity to elevate the depth of training provided beyond core knowledge and skills to include education on wellness, self-care, and emotional resilience to develop career-long habits.

Novel AI to avert the mental health crisis in COVID-19: Novel application of GPT2 in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy

The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health is substantial. The World Health Organization has called for action to avert an impending mental health crisis. To respond to this call, this paper contributes a novel application of Deep Learning in Natural Language Generation (NLG) to seed healthy thoughts for mental health therapy. For the 1st time in literature, a transfer learning capable large neural network with more than 100 million parameters for a NLG based mental health therapy application is proposed & demonstrated. This AI is designed to address scalable impact for millions of families with a timely health intervention in a privacy-safe approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research paper to apply GPT2 (Generative Pretrained Transformer) for Cognitive Behavior therapy (CBT). Further, the paper demonstrates the proposed neural network architecture with a lab prototype implementation with reproducible results. This paper demonstrates this AI’s ability to generate conditional synthetic human-like text intended to seed a healthy mental outlook. This is accomplished by fine tuning a pre-trained GPT2 language model. The source code and video demonstration is contributed at https://sites.google.com/view/ai-in-mental-health.Also, for the 1st time in literature, a novel idea of NLU (Natural Language Understanding) activated NLG therapy is demonstrated with reproducible results using a BERT based classifier to activate the GPT2 based therapy. Performance of GPT2 models of three different sizes (124, 355, 774 million parameters) was the same for a very small dataset, thus a small GPT2 model is suggested for on-device AI inference. This AI is a step forward in responding to WHO’s call for action to avert the crisis. Towards addressing all the three dimensions of the monumental challenge, the paper designed a novel AI architecture by taking advantage of both BERT & GPT2. It also demonstrated the feasibility of Transformers-based AI for developing a mental health therapy solution. Further, this paper contributed an open-source AI prototype to support research communities to transform global mental wellness.

Digital psychiatry: implications for patients and services

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an increased burden on all medical services and healthcare professionals are applying new strategies to cope with the added demands. During the pandemic mental healthcare services in many parts of the world have been reorganised to incorporate modern technology and maintain efficient service delivery. Mental health professionals are playing a major role in alleviating the suffering resulting from this pandemic. A selective survey of the literature, including narrative reviews, was carried out to study the implications of digital psychiatry. Historically, epidemics have had a substantial effect on mental health and general health services. Telehealth appears to be the right solution to the present mental health crisis, but technology cannot substitute for human presence and proximity in mental health services, so the newer interventions have advantages and disadvantages. Remote methods of therapy are likely to continue to be used and proper assessment of these new ways of working in psychiatry is required. In the post-pandemic period, the challenge will be to combine digital and in-person therapies. Discussions about digital revolution in the field of psychiatry should be modified to digital evolution.