Mental health conditions are increasing worldwide and are expected to affect 1.2 billion people by 2050. In this scenario, scientists and researchers are trying to better understand them, work to prevent them and develop new treatment tools.
Unlike medication-based treatments, talk therapies targeting mental health conditions are harder to develop, as neither human trials nor animal models can fully replicate the complexity of the conditions being studied — raising both practical and ethical obstacles in the process.
Now, a research team at Dresden University of Technology in Germany conducted a study to explore whether large language models (LLMs) can be used as tools for modelling mental health disorders in humans.
“Our results show that large language models can reproduce patterns of human affective and cognitive processes under controlled conditions,” said Dr Magdalena Wekenborg, head of the PsychoDigital Research group at TU Dresden.
“We can use these models as tools to better understand underlying mechanisms and to explore new approaches — for example in talk-based psychotherapy.”
