Beyond the hype: why artificial intelligence is not a shortcut to solving mental illness

Summary

More than one billion people worldwide live with a mental health disorder, and rising prevalence continues to outpace the capacity of mental health services. Artificial intelligence, and large language models in particular, have been widely proposed as a remedy. Nevertheless, psychiatry’s limited mechanistic understanding of illness processes (compounded by their psychosocial roots) and its reliance on largely subjective clinical assessments limit what any artificial intelligence model can achieve. We examine where artificial intelligence genuinely helps, including large multimodal data-sets and administrative tools such as ambient scribes, and where evidence for direct therapeutic use remains preliminary and safety concerns are real. We also highlight risks posed by artificial intelligence to the research process itself, from hallucinated citations to unverifiable analysis pipelines. Ultimately, whether artificial intelligence comes to augment psychiatric care or hollow it out depends less on model capability than on the choices of stakeholders and policymakers.