Listening for schizophrenia: How AI could help with early diagnosis The speech of people with schizophrenia sounds subtly different from their healthy counterparts. Can AI hear those differences better than human psychiatrists? Schizophrenia is tough to diagnose.
Patients may present with hallucinations (sometimes), social withdrawal (maybe) or delusions (not always). More generally, they just sound unlike themselves. Clinicians rely on their expertise and subtle cues to determine _how_ different patients’ speech is, along with which symptoms appear over time, to justify leaning toward schizophrenia rather than another mental illness.
This leads to delays in diagnosis. Americans with psychotic disorders — more than 3 million of whom have schizophrenia — receive a diagnosis a year and a half, on average, after their first symptoms appear. Researchers are now investigating whether artificial intelligence could improve diagnosis and care by listening to and analyzing what clinicians can’t hear or quantify, even if the software is working off just a few minutes of conversation.
AI won’t make its grand entrance into the clinic tomorrow. But it’s being hailed as the new frontier in psychiatric care, one that could enable early, accurate detection and personalized monitoring of illnesses based on indistinct symptoms. AI won’t replace radiologists, but will dramatically change their jobs “We have the tools to do that with the kind of precision that we have never had before,” says Thomas Insel, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who led the US National Institute of Mental Health for 13 years.
Schizophrenia is a disorder that interferes with people’s perception of reality, their thinking and their emotional regulation. It affects about 23 million people worldwide and is usually diagnosed between the late teens and early 30s. No one knows what causes it, but research suggests it could be a combination of genetics, environment, brain chemistry and substance use.
Clinicians stress the importance of detecting the disorder as early as possible, because the longer it is left untreated, the poorer the response to treatment and the greater the risk of brain tissue loss, worsening symptoms and suicide. But psychiatrists often make errors. Part of the problem is that diagnosis currently depends on subjective assessments.
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