lack of mental health data

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onto today’s topic: lack of mental health data 🧠 

the current state of neurotech is the use and implementation of brain computer interfaces (bcis for short — basically those headsets with wires coming from patches stuck to someone’s head).

bcis have shown really promising results with prosthetics and controlling them with the brain. they essentially track brainwave data and with this information, someone can then program a prosthetic arm or leg to bend in a certain way if the a certain brainwave pattern is recognized. 🧮 

why prosthetic development is doing so well as a result of neurotech and bcis is because it is very straightforward to identify these patterns and collect data for them. you can easily tell someone to think about moving their finger and you’ll be able to see the reflection of that action in terms of brainwave frequency very quickly. 👆️ 

with mental health, it’s not so simple. this why there haven’t been any huge advancements in mental health diagnostics via bcis. collecting mental health data is the biggest challenge.

you can tell someone to move their finger. you can’t tell someone to be depressed. it’s not as simple. depression isn’t something you can easily track as a concrete black and white. it’s easy to say x, y, z changes were observed when a person moved their finger versus when they didn’t. but depression isn’t a definitive state that can be measured when it’s on or off. it comes in waves, in different levels, and can always be present. it can’t just be turned off for the sake of data collection. 😵‍💫 

since mental health condititons aren’t objective, that makes it significantly more challenging to collect data on it. but, for more accurate diagnostics you need objective metrics, which is always data. it’s like a vicious cycle.

oh no! depression misdiagnosis is at 65%, we need to improve diagnostics → we need more objective data → let’s get data from mental health states → oh no! mental health isn’t objective, no data → misdiagnosis rate at 65%.

i’m unsure what exactly the solution is, but this is a problem i’ve been researching into and exploring for the past 2 years now. neurotech has an insane potential to impact hundreds of millions of people in the mental health space.

i want to see it happen. 🚀 

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