A simpler, better way to diagnose mental illness

DIAGNOSING MENTAL illness is difficult. Giving broad names such as “schizophrenia” and “bipolar disorder” to particular sets of symptoms helps psychiatrists and patients discuss and treat what is going on, but many traits are symptomatic of more than one such named condition, giving plenty of scope for mislabelling. Moreover, the specialised interviews required to detect the presence of particular traits are time-consuming and require specific training to conduct.A shortcut to reliable psychiatric diagnoses would therefore be desirable. Justin Baker, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, and Louis-Philippe Morency, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, think they have one. As they told the International Conference on Multimodal Interaction in Boulder, Colorado, on October 19th, they believe they can extract a lot of relevant information from patients’ speech patterns.