Reading Our Minds: The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry

by Daniel Barron

Overview

What is psychiatry and how can we improve it?

In the last hundred years, most of the medical sciences have progressed in immense and unforeseeable ways—except for psychiatry, which has somehow remained immune to this progress. Daniel Barron, a psychiatrist who trained at the Yale School of Medicine, asks an important question: What’s holding psychiatry back?

Reading Our Minds takes us to a psychiatric hospital, where Barron evaluates a young woman with psychosis, and shows how his exam is limited by his own ability to ask questions and observe, and by his patient’s ability to sense, interpret, and report her experience. Barron shows why psychiatry must move beyond conversation—and how sensors, measurements, and algorithms might progress psychiatric practice. At once pioneering and engaging, Reading Our Minds introduces readers to the Big Data technologies that might revolutionize the way we evaluate, diagnose, and treat mental illness and bring psychiatry firmly into the fold of 21st-century medical science.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781734420784
Publisher:	Columbia Global Reports
Publication date:	04/27/2021
Pages:	150
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Daniel Barron completed his medical training and Psychiatry residency at Yale University's Neuroscience research Training Program. He holds a PhD in Human Brain Imaging from the University of Texas and is a regular contributor at Scientific American. He hosts Science et al., a podcast produced by the Yale School of Medicine. He is currently a fellow in Pain Medicine at the University of Washington.Reading Our Minds is his first book. Follow him at @daniel__barron

Table of Contents

Introduction 10

Chapter 1 Online Behavior: Search History and Social Media 27

Chapter 2 Passive Data: Accelerometer, Geolocation, Call Logs 45

Chapter 3 Conversational Data: What We Say and How We Say It 60

Chapter 4 Stress Tests for the Brain 77

Chapter 5 Diagnosis: Turning Data into Action 94

Chapter 6 Platforms: Gathering and Making Sense of Data 109

Conclusion 131

Acknowledgments 137

Further Reading 139

Notes 141

Editorial Reviews

"Psychiatry needs innovation. While new insights may come from genetics and imaging, the smartphone and our digital data may prove an even better tool for objective evidence about our minds and brains. Daniel Barron takes us through the possibilities of this brave new world where technology, often cited as the problem, can become part of the solution for our mental health. With clarity and clinical relevance, he shows us that the future of psychiatry may be already in our hands (or our pockets)." —Tom Insel, Former Director, National Institute of Mental Health, and co-founder of Mindstrong, Humanest Care, Neurawell Therapeutics

"Barron's Reading Our Minds is wonderfully written and fun to read, a smart and lively exploration of how we can leverage the richness of digital data in a transparent and ethical way to make psychiatry more precise and better understand—and ultimately help—our patients. Barron shows how psychiatry can use technology and keep its humanity." —Richard A. Friedman, M.D., Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Director of Psychopharmacology Clinic, Weill Cornell Medical College

"Reading Our Minds is a fascinating book about how psychiatrists (and others) can think about and use large quantities of everyday information to refine diagnoses and even employ the results to determine therapeutic success. It reflects the future of psychiatry by bringing hard evidence to a 'soft' specialty." —Robert I. Grossman, M.D., Dean & CEO, NYU Langone Health

From the Publisher

2021-02-10
A psychiatrist offers a blue-sky vision of how smartphone and other data might help with treating mental health concerns from depression to schizophrenia.

In Mind Fixers (2019), Anne Harrington cast the history of psychiatry as a series of overzealous efforts to show that if the profession was troubled, “the field’s best days lay just over the horizon,” whether in the form of 19th-century mental hospitals or the 20th century’s surgical treatments, Freudian psychoanalysis, and “biological revolution.” Given that unpromising track record, readers may be skeptical of Barron’s thesis that digital tools might ease the profession’s current ills if only psychiatrists had access to tech like patients’ Fitbit stats, social media profiles, and Google search histories (“with their permission of course”). The author, a Scientific American contributor, offers slim, if sometimes-intriguing evidence of the potential uses of such “digital exhaust”—e.g., “Google searches for explicitly suicidal terms were better able to predict completed suicides than conventional self-report measures of suicide risk.” Barron also lays out the formidable barriers to tapping such benefits, ranging from patients’ fears about how their health data might be exploited to the difficulty of reproducing scientific studies when tech companies are reluctant to share their proprietary codes. Because of the obstacles to much of the research he describes, the author lacks sufficient data to make a convincing case that the “Big Data revolution” in psychiatry will be more successful than the failed “revolutions” described in Mind Fixers and other trenchant critiques. The most interesting parts of this book are Barron’s memorable anecdotes, some especially relevant to public health. “During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Google searches for symptoms like ‘I can’t smell’ were almost perfectly correlated with state-level reports of the disease prevalence,” he writes. “By pooling one symptom with other common searches,” public health officials could follow the emergence of outbreaks.

An iffy prescription for how big tech might enable psychiatrists to provide better patient care.

Kirkus Reviews