MHM Magazine

14 | MENTAL HEALTH MATTERS | 2023 | Issue 3 MHM The need for mental health support services in South Africa is dire, and during the course of the Covid-19 epidemic the prevalence of mental health distress only grew while the capacity to support patients stayed largely the same, especially in the public health sector. Simultaneously we have seen an explosion of technology based interventions that seek to help people with mental health and wellness support in a variety of ways. It has become time to bring the worlds of traditional treatment and these interventions closer together by exploring what these tools can do to support patients when traditional care is not always as available as it should be. The ecosystem of technology supports for health and wellness cover areas from physical health and wellness, to tracking moods and other activities like taking medication, to journaling apps and all the way up to chatbots with a focus on mental well-being. The reason for the rise in these sorts of technologies is varied, but things that contribute are: • The growing demand for mental health services • The technological advancements in the field that has made this possible • The accessibility of these technologies • The cost-effective nature of these technologies • The ability of these technologies to overcome some of the traditional barriers associated with therapy The conceptual history of chatbots really started in 1950 when Alan Turing put forth the concept of the Imitation Game - what would later be known as the Turing Test. In it, a person is presented with a console that has a keyboard and a monitor with which they can chat via text to two agents that are not visible to them, one a machine and the other human. They would be given time to converse with both agents using natural language through this interface and be asked to judge which agent was the machine and which one human. If the judge could not tell the difference, then it was proposed that intelligence was achieved. It may be surprising to learn that although this current wave of chatbots for mental health purposes is quite new, the first chatbot ever created was written in 1965 in the form of a Rogerian psychotherapist and was called ELIZA. It caused quite a sensation because even though its author claimed that there was no real intelligence in the chatbot, people still seemed to attribute much deeper meaning to the responses given and believed it was truly intelligent. This phenomenon came to be known as the ELIZA effect. We have come quite a long way since ELIZA with some people feeling that the current generation Dr Japie Greeff Deputy Director – School of Computer Science and Information Systems North-West University japie.greeff@nwu.ac.za THERAPY BY CHATBOT