List #13 - 'To Chat, or Bot to Chat, Just the First Question'
Plus, the making of the "potentially-ill digital subject"...
What I’m reading…
💡 Digital Psychiatry Transforms How We Think About Mental Health, Emaline Friedman (24 October 2020)
⚖ A Future Vision of Equity in eMental Health, Anil Thapliyal, Executive Director, eMental Health International Collaborative (October 2020)
🐋 New Zealand: Clearhead launches Te Reo Māori chatbot and website, eMHIC (October 2020).
🔵 Facebook announces new emotional health resource centre: ‘Connecting People to Mental Health Resources Around the World’, Facebook Newsroom (5 October 2020)
What I’ve written
🌐 A Scoping Review of Algorithmic and Data-Driven Technology in Online Mental Healthcare: What is Underway? And What Place for Ethics and Law? Co-authored with Timothy Kariotis, pre-print, awaiting peer-review, Journal of Medical Internet Research – Mental Health (October 2020)
We grouped the findings into five categories: social media (n=53), smartphones (n=37), sensing technology (n=20), chatbots (n=5), and other/miscellaneous (n=17). Most initiatives were directed toward “detection and diagnosis”… Ethics tend not to be explicitly addressed in the broad scholarship on algorithmic and data-driven technologies in online mental health initiatives—even less so legal issues. Scholars may have considered ethical or legal matters at the ethics committee/institutional review board stage of their empirical research but this consideration seldom appears in published material in any detail. We identify several concerns, including the near complete lack of involvement of service users, the scant consideration of ‘algorithmic accountability’, and the potential for over-medicalisation and ‘techno-solutionism’. Most papers were published in the computer science field at a pilot or exploratory stage. Thus, these technologies could be appropriated into practice in rarely acknowledged ways, with serious legal and ethical implications.
🤖 To Chat, or Bot to Chat, Just the First Question: Potential legal and ethical issues arising from a chatbot case study, Kobi Leins, Mark Cheong, Simon Coghlan, Simon D'Alfonso, Piers Gooding, Reeva Lederman, Jeannie Paterson (pre-print October 2020)
Chatbots raise a wide range of legal and ethical issues, including questions about suitability for the user group, data collection, security of data storage and privacy, later linking of data, repurposing, as well as broader questions of accountability, applicable regulatory frameworks and responsibility to report, just to name a few. Chatbots, as benign as they first seem, raise a multitude of ethical and legal issues, questions and potential liabilities that need to be thoughtfully addressed… Research amongst college students in the United States indicates that there are specific barriers to using chatbots for mental health, including privacy concerns, financial constraints, scepticism about treatment effectiveness, and, in particular, a lack of willingness to engage if the user is from a lower socioeconomic background… Whether or not a chatbot should be developed and used depends on an overall evaluation of its harms and benefits. If the benefits outweigh the harms, its use may be justified in some circumstances, depending on what those potential harms are. But sometimes the risks and harms will be too high to justify using particular chatbots for particular individuals.