Digital Psychiatry: Concepts, Framework, and Implications

Hairong WuMing D Li^*

• School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

In this review, we consider digital psychiatry as a specialty to focus on combining the psychiatric clinical practices, psychiatric knowledge, and modern intelligent/digital approaches to automate the psychiatric clinical processes, such as diagnosis and treatment, in order to yield faster, better and consistent results, which is far beyond the development of smartphone apps, virtual reality (VR), and chatbots. Based on the recent advances in largescale pre-trained models (PTMs), digital humans, VR and other immersive techniques, we here propose a framework to fully-automate the processes of mental health practices, and thus pave the way for digital psychiatric clinics. Specifically, in this paper, we first provide an outline of the related technological advances to digital mental health care, by detailing how digital entity, medical domain knowledge, autonomous agents and virtual reality present new opportunities for practical clinical uses. Second, we introduce some basic mental health clinical topics used in real-world settings. Third, we propose the framework of developing a fully-automated digital psychiatric system building on the existing artificial intelligence (AI) related technologies. Finally, we discuss the challenges of implementing the digital psychiatry in the real-world environments. We also point out that further efforts towards integrating and strengthening implementation are needed, and detail the key issues at the patient, provider and policy levels which must now be addressed for digital health technologies to truly improve mental health research and treatment in the future.