Instrumental Health

We are in the midst of a rising global mental health crisis, and are increasingly drawn to address the crisis by automating diagnosis and treatment. Automated treatment via software applications poses to revolutionise the cost and accessibility of mental health interventions, but raises concerns over how treatment will be delivered and received in digital form: who benefits, who is excluded, and who is exploited.

This project maps an emerging concept of mental health which is linked to technical treatment. This concept involves ‘instrumental rationality’ in which improved mental health is deemed to be observable in terms of behavioural changes, and quantifiable via statistical measures. The treatment of mental health becomes a technical act of adjustment.

32 million people access the mental health section of NHS Choices website every year, but mental health service in the UK is chronically underfunded. Automation is seen as a solution to this problem, where the scale of the crisis is matched by the scale promised by technological automation. However, handing human labour over to technology has unpredictable consequences, and the effects of automation are often only understood in hindsight. By the time a technology has become ubiquitous, 'tacit normative consensus' is achieved, and it becomes extremely difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.