Meeting Reports: 2024 Chen Institute and Science Joint Conference on AI & Mental Health
Meeting Reports
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Nov 7, 2024
Meeting in Shanghai for the 2024 Chen Institute and Science Joint Conference on AI & Mental Health, researchers discussed emerging opportunities to democratize care and unlock transformative research breakthroughs.
The world urgently needs breakthrough solutions to enable more effective and scalable care for mental health conditions. Today, nearly 1 billion people worldwide are living with a mental health disorder, according to the World Health Organization, with rates of depression and anxiety surging by more than 25% during a single year of the COVID-19 pandemic. But trained mental health professionals are in short supply, and people experiencing mental health crises seldom receive the support they need. Even in wealthy countries, fewer than one-quarter of people with depression receive minimally adequate treatment; in lower-income regions of the world, as few as 3% of patients receive effective care for their mental health conditions.
Emerging digital technologies such as AI could bring affordable and effective treatment to more people around the world, relieving pressure on overburdened health systems and yielding important new insights to drive research forward. To accelerate that transformation and discuss the challenges involved in scaling AI for mental health, Science and the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute (TCCI) invited some of the world’s top researchers to attend the 2024 Chen Institute and Science Joint Conference on AI & Mental Health, hosted in November at the Shanghai Mental Health Center (SMHC).
Well over 200 researchers, students, and clinicians from across China also attended the two-day conference— so many that organizers briefly fretted that there wouldn’t be room for everyone to fit in the lecture hall. The center’s public events are always popular, says SMHC director and chief physician Dr. Yifeng Xu, but the Joint Conference on AI & Mental Health took things to a new level, with everyone from senior international researchers to high school students and even kindergarten teachers crowding into the packed auditorium. “We weren’t just seeing medical professionals. There were engineers, and physicists, and computer scientists, and mathematicians, and students of all kinds—all interested in learning how they can contribute to society, and help vulnerable people,” Dr. Xu says. “I think that’s why this meeting attracted such a huge audience.” Many of the invited speakers expressed similar excitement about the potential for using cutting-edge AI technologies to unlock new ways of understanding mental health—and of treating patients more effectively and efficiently than is currently possible. “Mental health research has changed fundamentally during the last decades,” Page | 2 says Dr. Nils Opel, a distinguished professor for translational psychiatry at University Hospital Jena, Germany. With the rise of AI, Dr. Opel explains, the pace of change is rapidly accelerating—and, increasingly, leading to real-world clinical applications with the potential to improve access and enable far more people to get the care and support they need. “What I think has attracted me, and many others, to this field is that we can really see the chance of changing the status quo,” Dr. Opel says. “We could see a real paradigm shift in the next couple of years, and that is very motivating.”
While many major neuroscience and mental health conferences include some mention of AI, and many AI conferences touch on mental health issues, it’s still rare to see a major international conference focus squarely on the intersections of mental health with AI and computational technologies. That made the Joint Conference on AI & Mental Health a uniquely valuable space for researchers from around the world to reach beyond the regional regulatory, cultural, or linguistic barriers that often hold back innovation, and to find ways to collaborate and share insights, says Peter Stern, senior editor of Science. “It's crucial that we have these collaborations,” Stern adds. “We believe in science without borders—and why? Because it will help us to discover. It's crucial that we come together, without borders, to have these discussions.”
Meeting in Shanghai for the 2024 Chen Institute and Science Joint Conference on AI & Mental Health, researchers discussed emerging opportunities to democratize care and unlock transformative research breakthroughs.
The world urgently needs breakthrough solutions to enable more effective and scalable care for mental health conditions. Today, nearly 1 billion people worldwide are living with a mental health disorder, according to the World Health Organization, with rates of depression and anxiety surging by more than 25% during a single year of the COVID-19 pandemic. But trained mental health professionals are in short supply, and people experiencing mental health crises seldom receive the support they need. Even in wealthy countries, fewer than one-quarter of people with depression receive minimally adequate treatment; in lower-income regions of the world, as few as 3% of patients receive effective care for their mental health conditions.
Emerging digital technologies such as AI could bring affordable and effective treatment to more people around the world, relieving pressure on overburdened health systems and yielding important new insights to drive research forward. To accelerate that transformation and discuss the challenges involved in scaling AI for mental health, Science and the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute (TCCI) invited some of the world’s top researchers to attend the 2024 Chen Institute and Science Joint Conference on AI & Mental Health, hosted in November at the Shanghai Mental Health Center (SMHC).
Well over 200 researchers, students, and clinicians from across China also attended the two-day conference— so many that organizers briefly fretted that there wouldn’t be room for everyone to fit in the lecture hall. The center’s public events are always popular, says SMHC director and chief physician Dr. Yifeng Xu, but the Joint Conference on AI & Mental Health took things to a new level, with everyone from senior international researchers to high school students and even kindergarten teachers crowding into the packed auditorium. “We weren’t just seeing medical professionals. There were engineers, and physicists, and computer scientists, and mathematicians, and students of all kinds—all interested in learning how they can contribute to society, and help vulnerable people,” Dr. Xu says. “I think that’s why this meeting attracted such a huge audience.” Many of the invited speakers expressed similar excitement about the potential for using cutting-edge AI technologies to unlock new ways of understanding mental health—and of treating patients more effectively and efficiently than is currently possible. “Mental health research has changed fundamentally during the last decades,” Page | 2 says Dr. Nils Opel, a distinguished professor for translational psychiatry at University Hospital Jena, Germany. With the rise of AI, Dr. Opel explains, the pace of change is rapidly accelerating—and, increasingly, leading to real-world clinical applications with the potential to improve access and enable far more people to get the care and support they need. “What I think has attracted me, and many others, to this field is that we can really see the chance of changing the status quo,” Dr. Opel says. “We could see a real paradigm shift in the next couple of years, and that is very motivating.”
While many major neuroscience and mental health conferences include some mention of AI, and many AI conferences touch on mental health issues, it’s still rare to see a major international conference focus squarely on the intersections of mental health with AI and computational technologies. That made the Joint Conference on AI & Mental Health a uniquely valuable space for researchers from around the world to reach beyond the regional regulatory, cultural, or linguistic barriers that often hold back innovation, and to find ways to collaborate and share insights, says Peter Stern, senior editor of Science. “It's crucial that we have these collaborations,” Stern adds. “We believe in science without borders—and why? Because it will help us to discover. It's crucial that we come together, without borders, to have these discussions.”
© 2025 Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute
© 2025 Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute
© 2025 Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute