From the Editor
The voices became quieter, and the paranoia lessened. But my patient continued to complain about his lack of motivation. He left the hospital, but he never rejoined the workforce. Negative symptoms are difficult to treat.
Could an app help? In a new JAMA Network Open paper, Abhishek Pratap (of Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals) and his co-authors attempt to answer that question. They describe a randomized clinical trial of 457 individuals with negative symptoms of schizophrenia, comparing those receiving an app (CT-155) intervention featuring evidence-based psychosocial treatments against an active control. “These findings support CT-155 as a potential adjunctive therapy for patients for an indication of negative symptoms of schizophrenia with a high unmet need for FDA-approved pharmacologic treatments specifically targeting negative symptoms.” We discuss the paper and its implications.
As more and more people turn to chatbots for mental health advice, we should ask: how can we make them safer? In a new Comment from npj Digital Medicine, Joanna M. Streck (of Harvard University) and her co-authors describe experimentation with an AI chatbot and the lessons learned. “We describe suicide safety monitoring features for a chatbot implemented in a high-risk clinical setting and make recommendations for chatbot design alongside human-monitoring and triage.”
Finally, in the third selection, Dr. Danilo Rojas-Velasquez (of Harvard University) writes about clinical notes and language in a paper for Academic Psychiatry. He offers suggestions for learners, noting how language affects care – a topic now even more relevant with the growing use of AI scribes. “We watch language do its quiet work, and we write notes that will, in turn, shape how the next team thinks.”
DG
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