Npj Digital Medicine published a meta-study about the effectiveness of using conversational agents (CAs or as they’re commonly called, chatbots) to help young people with mental health interventions. Their overall goal was to evaluate fully automated CAs “as a tool to improve the emotional component of mental health among [the] young population.” They looked at twenty-five overall studies with a total population of over 1,700 individuals.
Their findings? “overall, the results of the current scoping review showed that automated CAs mediated interventions for emotional problems are acceptable, engaging and with high usability.” That sounds promising, but there’s a caveat: they’re not really helping overall mental health, at least not in a lasting way. While they provide someone to talk to in the moment (helpful), the impact may be fleeting (not as helpful).
In general, they are effective, especially among younger generations (mostly Generation Z). There is one massive caveat. Though this article was published in March, 2024, the “selected databases were searched in March 2023.” For the sharp-eyed among you, you’ll notice that that was a year ago.
What this means is that these conversational agents were either built on traditional, script- and rule-based methods of building chatbots or that they were on seriously outdated AI. At the start of March, 2023, OpenAI’s GPT-4 wasn’t even released let alone Anthropic’s Claude 3, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and a host of open- and closed-sourced AI models that put what was available a year ago to shame.
With the rapid advancements in AI and conversational agents over the past year, it’s clear that the potential for mental health applications tailored to Gen Z is immense, and future studies will undoubtedly reveal even stronger results on improving the emotional well-being of young adults.
