STABILISE

Disclaimer: It is important to note that STABILISE is a work in progress operated by an educated woman with lived experience with bipolar disorder and computer scientists interested in improving access to practical knowledge, medical professionals, and crisis responders. We are building a mobile application that is designed to track moods and analyse text so help can be provided sooner. For medical advice, please consult your family doctor or a trusted health care practitioner. If you believe you are in need of immediate medical assistance and live in North America, call 911. Otherwise, please reach out to the Lifeline at 988 (by phone or text).

Tag: ethics

  • On Asking Hard Questions

    On Asking Hard Questions

    How much responsibility can be allocated to an AI chatbot for monitoring someone’s mental health?

    That’s a hard question — a tricky puzzle because it involves a few important factors.

    Let’s say someone is wondering if they are exhibiting signs of depression or mania. They could ask someone in their life to pay attention to their moods and behaviors, they could consult a medical professional, and they could monitor their own moods and behaviors.

    Self-monitoring is a crucial skill to learn.

    The first step is awareness.

    Do you know where you are?

    This is your breath, the part of you that anchors you to earth right now. Not the past, not the future, this moment, the one with features that can be measured.

    One of the reasons why writing is considered to be as therapeutic as it is is because it is a grounding exercise.

    It roots the person in the now, a blank page offering the space needed to express whatever it is the person wants to express.

    The benefit of an AI chatbot, especially one that is well-designed, is that it can serve as a sounding board for ideas, thoughts, and concepts. It can also pinpoint language that indicates professional help may be beneficial.

    Self-monitoring is a crucial skill to learn because the self-observation process ideally helps build recognition of recurring moods and patterns. It also encourages the person to adopt a wide variety of strategies designed to improve one’s mental health. The trick is to learn how to utilize each of them at optimal times.

    I speculate that learning what optimal times means is different for everyone. But on a surface level, it seems as though it would be helpful for people to have an alarm system of sorts. It’s one thing to write that you are feeling depressed, another to have an objective party state that you have expressed feelings of depression for the past three weeks, your steps count has decreased, your heart has not engaged in the same sort of activity for days, and you exhibit signs of social isolation.

    Does it seem disingenuous for personal data to be interpreted and presented by a machine?

    Hard questions, especially when AI hallucinates. The other day, it counted the number of words wrong. Not by a couple of digits, but a couple thousand.

    There is a need for diligence, streamlining, creating spaces for resources that maybe weren’t known before.

    It all becomes very important — the details, I mean.

  • On Being Honest

    In the preface of Emmanuel Levinas’ book, Totality & Infinity, Yale professor John Wild writes,

    “But, according to Levinas, speaking becomes serious only when we pay attention to the other and take account of him and the strange world he inhabits.”

    There are moments when it is simpler to quote philosophy than it is to actually live it. I want to spend time discussing what it means to pay attention to another human being. A strong component is actively listening to what somebody has to say. This doesn’t necessitate agreement, but rather, an acknowledgment of the other as a person in the world who deserves to be heard.

    I would like to get better at this.

    My fascination with Levinas began in my final year of undergrad. I was introduced to him by a female professor who was teaching Philosophy of Religion. His book is dense and intricate, each page requiring me to read over them multiple times. It has been more than a decade since I got my degree and I still stumble over what he meant by the face-to-face encounter. From what I have gathered this far, it involves care and recognition of the other as an essential being in the world. It also requires lived experience.

    The difficulty I encounter is pausing before reacting. I can be mercurial, often speaking before thinking. I think what Levinas is requesting in his ethical framework is for human beings to be thoughtful in their approach of the other. It is more than kindness or care, but genuine acknowledgment of the shared humanness. When this acknowledgment is made, there is an active space for listening.

    While I am still in the process of reading through his book, I do want to mention that I believe this is a premeditated and perpetual process. That is, one must make a decision to approach others from this ethical framework at all times consistently and repeatedly. It is not a choice that happens once, but steadily throughout the course of each interaction. Here’s to hoping I strive towards that ideal and improve my understanding of his articulate concepts.