AI Therapy on Trial: Exploring the Future of Mental Health Care Across Nations

AI-driven mental health interventions, including chatbots and diagnostic tools, are increasingly adopted for their accessibility and ability to scale efficiently. However, there is still little research comparing them to human therapy, for important factors such as trust. Therefore, we will employ a multi-modal approach, including survey data, experimental tasks, and sentiment analysis of real-world AI mental health discussions to compare AI-based therapy to human therapy. Data will be collected across countries. Our primary research question is: How do social connectedness, self-stigma towards help seeking, AI literacy, transparency, and perceived fairness affect trust towards AI vs human mental health interventions? This research can contribute to ethical AI development along with guide policy and intervention recommendations for enhancing trust in digital(mental) healthcare.

Team

Supervisor: Dilan Yücel
Communication Officer and Project manager: Brin Angotti
Materials and Data collection managers: Sophie Belfield and Jiayue Sun
Literature and Writing managers: Cara O’Dwyer, Luka Kalita, and Sophie Belfield
Analyst offers: Jiayue Sun and Luka Kalita