Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: May 8, 2025
Date Accepted: Jun 27, 2025
“I believe that AI will recognize the problem before it happens” – An interview study exploring young adults' perceptions of Artificial Intelligence in mental healthcare
ABSTRACT
Background:
Globally, young adults with mental health problems struggle to access appropriate and timely care, which may lead to a poorer future prognosis. Artificial intelligence (AI) is suggested to improve the quality of mental health care, through increased capacities in diagnostics, monitoring, access, advanced decision making, and virtual consultations. Within mental healthcare, the design and application of AI solutions should elucidate the patient perspective on AI.
Objective:
The aim was to explore perceptions of AI in mental healthcare from the viewpoint of young adults with experience of seeking help for common mental health problems.
Methods:
This was an interview study with 25 young adults aged between 18 and 30, that applied a qualitative inductive design, with content analysis, to explore how AI-based technology can be used in mental health care.
Results:
Three categories were derived from the analysis, representing the participants' perceptions of how AI-based technology can be used in care for mental health problems. The first category, AI can support and guide entailed perceptions of AI-based technology as a digital companion, supporting individuals at difficult times, reminding and suggesting self-care activities, suggesting sources of information and generally being receptive to changes in behaviour or mood. The second category, AI can change care processes revolved around AI enabling more effective care, and functioning as a tool, both for the patient and for healthcare providers (HCPs). Young adults expressed confidence in AI to improve triage, screening, identification and diagnosis. The third category, AI comes with uncertainties concerned risks and scepticism towards AI as a product developed by humans with limitations. Young adults voiced concerns about security and integrity, and about AI being autonomous, incapable of human empathy but with strong predictive capabilities.
Conclusions:
Young adults recognize the potential of AI to serve as personalized support, and its function as a digital guide and companion between mental healthcare consultations. It was believed that AI will function as a support in navigating the help-seeking process, ensuring that they avoid the ‘missing middle’ service gap. They also voiced that AI will improve efficiency in healthcare, through monitoring, diagnostic accuracy and reduction of healthcare professionals’ workload, whilst simultaneously reducing the need for young adults to repeatedly tell their stories. Young adults express an ambivalence towards the use of AI in healthcare and voice risks of data integrity and bias. They consider AI to be more rational and objective than healthcare professionals but do not want to forsake personal interaction with humans. Based on the results of this study and young adults’ perceptions of the monitoring capabilities of AI future studies should define the boundaries regarding information collection responsibilities of the healthcare system vs the individuals’ responsibility for self-care.
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Copyright
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