Share this content
Introduction
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly developing and transformative technology which has the capacity to impact all areas of our lives. Chatbots are increasingly a part of everyday life, including changing how people can access, support and develop relationships and support structures outside of real life, with many mental health services beginning to offer some form of chatbot support. Advances in AI technology are additionally moving towards Artificial Wisdom (Jeste et al., 2020; Lee et al., 2021) as a way of incorporating ethics, morals, and contexts. The future possibilities of technology are boundless, but the pace of development can create challenges: will the journey be smooth or perilous?
AI can play a role in developing relationships and providing support, as well as helping clinicians and practitioners to examine large samples of individual client data to provide a more tailored, accurate, and timely approach to health care and mental health support, additionally allowing users to have more control of the support they receive (i.e. Lee et al., 2021; Schueller et al., 2017). However, there may be harms associated with use by certain vulnerable populations (Patel and Hussein, 2024). Various human-centered design decisions such as human-in-the-loop methods (e.g., Chandler, Foltz, & Elvevåg, 2022), explainability (e.g., Sarkar et al., 2023), or human-centered design with stakeholders (Bolpagni et al., 2024) have been proposed to maintain the high ethical and safety standards of mental health service delivery and more models are likely to emerge. While this technology is unlikely to evolve solely as a tool in isolation and, instead, is likely to become a technology whose influence infiltrates a wide variety of existing modes of delivery (e.g. as an in-app digital assistant; as a means of actively and functionally responding to user-behaviour in digital games; as a means of intelligently tracking wider behavioural patterns to identify just-in-time intervention opportunities), much is yet to be understood about the design decisions underlying safe and effective use of this technology in mental healthcare.
This special issue explores the relationship between AI and mental health and aims to encourage discussion and examination of how effective systems of artificial intelligence for mental health can be designed and evaluated. We are particularly interested in explorations of AI and conversational agent design decisions that promote or impede mental health outcomes. We welcome original research articles and practitioner papers relating to the applications of AI for mental health intervention, detection, professional training, and for supporting wellbeing, as well as concerning the challenges and ethical issues associated with this rapidly developing area.
List of Topic Areas
- Therapeutic approaches incorporating the use of AI (e.g. chatbots, AI for personalised psychological care).
- AI as concurrent mental health intervention support (e.g., co-therapy, human-in-the-loop systems).
- Applications of machine learning and language modelling in prediction and prevention (e.g. for early-onset detection, clinician decision support tools).
- Ethical and practical issues regarding the implementation of AI innovations for mental health support and training.
- The development and evaluation of AI models as diagnostic tools for mental health.
- Applications of AI for outpatient monitoring and relapse prevention.
- Implementations of Artificial Wisdom.
- Use of AI as educational and professional training tools in the context of mental health.
Submission Information
Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here:
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see:
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.
Key Dates
Closing date for manuscript submissions: 30 April 2026
Share this content