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. 2024 Jan 4:14:1277756.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1277756. eCollection 2023.

ChatGPT is not ready yet for use in providing mental health assessment and interventions

Ismail Dergaa #  1   2   3 , Feten Fekih-Romdhane #  4   5 , Souheil Hallit  6   7   8 , Alexandre Andrade Loch  9   10 , Jordan M Glenn  11 , Mohamed Saifeddin Fessi  3 , Mohamed Ben Aissa  12 , Nizar Souissi  2 , Noomen Guelmami  13 , Sarya Swed  14 , Abdelfatteh El Omri  15 , Nicola Luigi Bragazzi  16 , Helmi Ben Saad  17   18
Affiliations

ChatGPT is not ready yet for use in providing mental health assessment and interventions

Ismail Dergaa et al. Front Psychiatry. .

Abstract

Background: Psychiatry is a specialized field of medicine that focuses on the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental health disorders. With advancements in technology and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), there has been a growing interest in exploring the potential of AI language models systems, such as Chat Generative Pre-training Transformer (ChatGPT), to assist in the field of psychiatry.

Objective: Our study aimed to evaluates the effectiveness, reliability and safeness of ChatGPT in assisting patients with mental health problems, and to assess its potential as a collaborative tool for mental health professionals through a simulated interaction with three distinct imaginary patients.

Methods: Three imaginary patient scenarios (cases A, B, and C) were created, representing different mental health problems. All three patients present with, and seek to eliminate, the same chief complaint (i.e., difficulty falling asleep and waking up frequently during the night in the last 2°weeks). ChatGPT was engaged as a virtual psychiatric assistant to provide responses and treatment recommendations.

Results: In case A, the recommendations were relatively appropriate (albeit non-specific), and could potentially be beneficial for both users and clinicians. However, as complexity of clinical cases increased (cases B and C), the information and recommendations generated by ChatGPT became inappropriate, even dangerous; and the limitations of the program became more glaring. The main strengths of ChatGPT lie in its ability to provide quick responses to user queries and to simulate empathy. One notable limitation is ChatGPT inability to interact with users to collect further information relevant to the diagnosis and management of a patient's clinical condition. Another serious limitation is ChatGPT inability to use critical thinking and clinical judgment to drive patient's management.

Conclusion: As for July 2023, ChatGPT failed to give the simple medical advice given certain clinical scenarios. This supports that the quality of ChatGPT-generated content is still far from being a guide for users and professionals to provide accurate mental health information. It remains, therefore, premature to conclude on the usefulness and safety of ChatGPT in mental health practice.

Keywords: anxiety; chatbots; depression; insomnia; language models; mental health; patient care; psychiatric disorders.

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Conflict of interest statement

JG was employed by Neurotrack Technologies. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

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