Prevention of Suicide using AI and modern technologies

Artificial Intelligence AI is most of the times confusing, terrifying, over hyped, hard to understand but still brings the results with a wow factor. And the 'wow' factor today we are going to focus on is that AI can predict mental healthiness and bring down the percentage of suicides.



We don't relate 'technology' and 'emotions'. But AI has brought both these two into one hood to improve our well being in many fields.

There are various of causes for suicide such as Anxiety, loneliness, family issues, health issues, extreme sadness etc. These emotions lead to depression and mental stress.
Depressed people don't behave in the same manner as a normal person behave. They tend to show high state of urgency, behave strange and don’t enunciate vowels as much as people who aren’t depressed.
Their smiles are smaller. And also people with suicidal intentions speak in a breathy voice and in a tense tone and are more likely to show their frustrations and mood swings physically and mentally. Patients with psychotic disorders, such as one form of schizophrenia, raise their eyebrows often when averting their gaze.

That's where AI plays a good part in recognizing these depressions and capturing those emotions to try to help those patients.

One of the latest victims Etika a famous you tube celebrity committed suicide recently. And the real factor is he has shown his anxiety and depression online days before committing suicide which we have neglected to focus on.



“Artificial intelligence can sense those emotions through people’s facial expressions and behaviors to help doctors do a more objective assessment of mental health,” says
Louis-Philippe Morency, an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
These are among the behavioral bio markers researchers have established using facial and acoustic analysis. With technology, they measure shifts not always discernible to the eye or ear, such as slight movements of facial muscles as well as subtle changes in tone and language.

‘People think that robots are the complete inverse of emotions,’ says Es Lee, the founder of NY-based startup Mei, ‘but emotions are the perfect use case for AI, because we’re not always comfortable talking about our emotions with other individuals.




Mei is primarily a messaging app for Android that helps to recognize the mental illness and calm or alert the users in text format. When it senses something abnormal it sends a message. “Hey, you’re interacting differently with Tom, is everything okay?”
The app would then ask the user’s responses (yes or no, with the option to give more information) to better understand their problem and their current mental illness.

👍 Smartphones vs suicidal prevention
When people suffering from depression speak, the range and pitch of their voice tends to be lower. There are more pauses, starts and stops between words. They breathe heavily. These emotions can be recorded by modern smartphones. and also I strongly believe Machines can detect these things better than humans.
Smartphones with AI enabled can get a clear picture of its users behavior, scan that with the algorithm and then send an alert message to users close relatives and friends. Then they also can alert to the doctors and therapists and connect them with the user to calm his nerves and overcome his mental illness. And by this means we reach those depressed persons and help them instead of them asking for help.

👍 Videos and photos can help in identifying visual patterns.
Depressed people move their heads less often. Their smiles don’t last as long as it would normally do. One research team led by Andrew Reece and Christopher Danforth analyzed 43,950 Instagram photos from 166 people and were able to recognize depressed persons and their prediction was about 70 % correct, which is better than general practice doctors.

👍 Tech companies are coming their way in helping in these issues. A company called Mindstrong is trying to measure mental health by how people use their smartphones. They record how they type and scroll, how frequently they delete characters etc. So based on the behavioral study, they alert the concerned authorities regarding this.

When you search for “ways to kill yourself” or “suicidal thoughts”, Google search immediately takes the user to a page that provides information on 24*7 suicidal prevention lifeline, along with an online chat to help overcome the suicidal feelings. In India, this search leads to a web page http://www.aasra.info suicidal preventive organisation.( 🏆 Let us know the web page in your respective countries in the comment section) Google has also disabled autocomplete for the searches like 'suicidal ways' or 'ways to harm yourself'. Because as per Google’s autocomplete policy guidelines, predictions on suicidal searches comes under harmful or dangerous behavior and hence does not yield desired results. Let us thanks one more time Google for this.

Facebook also has started looking for signs of suicidal thoughts through posts. Using AI, Facebook scans users’ posts and looks for patterns of suicidal behavior. It then flags the posts to human moderators who then respond by sending user resources on mental health. In urgent situations, the company contacts the first-res ponders who can try to find the individual.
Additionally, Facebook works with 80 local partners like Save.org and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline to develop policies on self-harm and suicide-related content.

👍 AI helping the mental healthiness of young children
A modern machine learning algorithm can detect signs of anxiety and depression in the speech patterns of young children, potentially providing a fast and easy way of diagnosing conditions that are difficult to spot and often overlooked in young people. If diagnosed, they can lead to an increased risk of substance abuse and suicide later in life.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimate of 60 percent of people who commit suicide have major depression. Different versions of suicide-prevention AI-tools and apps like Woebot, Crisis Text Line are being deployed to address symptoms like depression that could possibly lead to a suicide.

Robin Williams at 63 years , Marilyn Monroe at 36 years old, Mindy McCready at 37 years old, Jonathan Brandis at 27 years old have all been added to the suicidal list. Just for a second think if there would have been anything like a Smartphone with AI enabled to calm them during their depression or to alert others about their red state would then the outcome would have wonderful and different.

But questions about privacy, cost and implementation still concerns when AI moves
from the lab to the marketplace.Although AI looks promising for the field of mental health, it faces a long road from the research lab to real-life application. Joshua Magee, an assistant psychology professor at Miami University, published a study last year examining mental-health apps, which aren’t regulated. He concluded that consumers should be cautious and use such apps only in conjunction with a mental-health professional.

These kind of initiatives and studies for the search of good apps will happen continuously to save our fellow humans and let us give our hands in saving them. Hope the suicidal list ends one day and thank AI for helping us achieving this. So next time when you receive a simple 'how are you' , it might be from a AI driven application to calm your nervous. If you are really not ok then just simply say am not ok. Let AI take it from there. 🏆