Google Life Sciences' Insel: Technology Will Unlock Better Mental Health Diagnostics
Thomas Insel, the National Institute of Mental Health’s (NIMH) director, recently announced that he’d move to Google Life Sciences (GLS), effective in November. The Washington Post (TWP) sat down with Insel and discussed everything from the most recent school shootings to a troubling increase in national suicide rates. Data analytics and effective tracking, said Insel, might hold the key to unlocking earlier and more comprehensive diagnostics and treatments for mental health patients.
Though Insel was careful to emphasize that most mental health issues are non-violent and that not every violent outburst is rooted in mental health, he told TWP that risks of violent behavior are drastically reduced once treatment begins, and recent research suggests that psychotic breaks are preceded by two to three years of struggling.
“We should take a page from our approach to heart disease by identifying who is at the highest risk and developing interventions that preempt psychosis,” said Insel.
In his tenure as NIMH director, Insel has been outspoken about the need for better, more precise diagnostics in mental health care and has pushed for the Institute’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) to investigate a biological approach to psychiatric illness. A recent piece in Psychology Today remarked that the key to effectively treating mental illness is knowing exactly what we’re looking for and how to classify it.
The Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, introduced by President Obama in April 2013, has invested $300 million in deeper study of the brain, how it works, and how innovative technologies can be used to treat devastating disorders such as Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, traumatic brain injury, and epilepsy.
While he gives enormous credit to the federal effort to advance neurotechnology, Insel said he was lured to GLS by his excitement over an enormous tech giant like Google willing and eager to throw its hat into the mental health diagnostics ring.
“While technology has had an enormous impact… in so many parts of our lives, it still really hasn’t had the impact one might expect in health care,” Insel told TWP. “What was really the offer that I couldn’t refuse was the possibility that a big tech company like Alphabet [newly formed parent company of GLS] would want to do something in this area.”
GLS is an industry leader in data analytics, an area that Insel believes will be instrumental in the next generation of mental health technologies that track behavioral changes and monitor a number of different health markers. Sleep, speech, activity, biology, and social interaction all analyzed together would paint a clearer picture of how mental illness begins and progresses. This data would be “transformative if we do it well,” said Insel.
“We need better science,” said Insel. “Just as we need that in cancer and heart disease and diabetes, we need to do that for mental illness. So we have to keep raising the bar, investing in science, getting the very best science done.”