Webinars

In this session, mental health advocate and executive Keris Myrick, MS, MBA explores the ethical landscape of AI in mental health. She argues that without the meaningful involvement of people with lived experience, digital systems risk misunderstanding the communities they aim to serve. Ms. Myrick discusses the importance of privacy, data ownership, and race equity, emphasizing that technology must be guided by human insight rather than leaving the "wizard" behind the curtain to decide the future of care.

About Keris Myrick:

Keris Myrick is a leading mental health advocate and executive, known for her innovative and inclusive approach to mental health and substance use reform and the public disclosure of her personal story. Keris is the developer and host of the podcast Unapologetically Black Unicorns, which focuses on mental health, race equity, and lived experience. She is an in-demand national trainer and keynote speaker and has authored several peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on the peer workforce, inclusion of lived experience, and digital therapeutics in mental health. She is Senior Vice President of Partnerships and Innovation at Inseparable and serves as a clinical advisor for the Digital Psychiatry program at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Keris has over 20 years of experience in innovations, transformation, and peer workforce development in mental health services and has been addressing race equity throughout her career at the local, state, federal, and national levels.

About the 2025 Society of Digital Psychiatry Symposium:

The 2025 Society of Digital Psychiatry Symposium is an event focused on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and mental healthcare. With this year’s theme, "Advancing Digital Mental Health Through AI," the symposium provides a unique platform for thought leaders and innovators to explore the latest AI advancements reshaping the mental health landscape.

In this session, Steve Siddals, MSc, a psychology researcher and technology executive affiliated with the BIDMC Digital Psychiatry Lab, explores the firsthand experiences of individuals using generative AI for emotional support. Drawing on a global study involving nineteen participants, Steve discusses how tools like ChatGPT are being used as an "emotional sanctuary" and a source of "insightful guidance" for relationship challenges and trauma healing. He will also highlight the novel themes emerging from generative AI usage compared to traditional rule-based chatbots and the critical need for improved safety guardrails.

About Steve Siddals:

Steve Siddals is a psychology researcher and technology executive, affiliated to the BIDMC digital psychiatry lab, with an academic background in the psychology and neuroscience of mental health (King's College London MSc) and computer science and mathematics (Oxford University BA), and 25 years' experience leading technology transformation for multinationals. Last year, Steve led one of the first studies to explore real-life experiences of using tools like ChatGPT for mental health. He interviewed nineteen people from across the world about what it's like to turn to generative AI for emotional support and healing, and analyzed the themes and implications. The study was published in the Nature partner journal for mental health research.

Read the full paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4418...

About the 2025 Society of Digital Psychiatry Symposium:

The 2025 Society of Digital Psychiatry Symposium is an event focused on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and mental healthcare. With this year’s theme, "Advancing Digital Mental Health Through AI," the symposium provides a unique platform for thought leaders and innovators to explore the latest AI advancements reshaping the mental health landscape.

In this session, STAT News journalist Meghana Keshavan, BS discusses how reporting identifies early signals of AI-linked psychosis, emotional destabilization, and compulsive engagement. She highlights the widening gap between real-world lived experience and formal evidence, arguing that journalism’s role is to surface hypotheses that guide clinicians toward the right questions for future research.

About Meghana Keshavan:

Meghana Keshavan is a journalist at STAT News, the health care arm of the Boston Globe. She has been covering the biotech sector for more than a decade, reporting on the intersection of biotechnology, artificial intelligence, drug development, and federal health policy. She writes STAT’s Readout newsletter, a daily compendium of the most important technological news in health care — including artificial intelligence. Her recent coverage includes FDA regulatory processes, advances in mental health treatments, psychedelic-assisted therapy research, and issues affecting the U.S. biopharmaceutical industry. Meghana joined STAT in 2016. Before that, she worked for news outlets like Thomson Reuters, the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit Metro Times and NPR affiliate WDET. As a young lass, Meghana toiled five years as a research peon in a schizophrenia genetics lab. She once spilled ethidium bromide on herself, and might be a mutant.

About the 2025 Society of Digital Psychiatry Symposium:

The 2025 Society of Digital Psychiatry Symposium is an event focused on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and mental healthcare. With this year’s theme, "Advancing Digital Mental Health Through AI," the symposium provides a unique platform for thought leaders and innovators to explore the latest AI advancements reshaping the mental health landscape.

In this session, Dr. Amir Rahmani, PhD, Professor at UC Irvine, explores how "Living Labs" and community-embedded innovation environments can bridge the gap between traditional clinical trials and real-world healthcare. Dr. Rahmani discusses advanced methodologies like SMART trial design and introduces openCHA, a new open platform for agentic conversational health agents. He highlights how integrating wearables, mobile computing, and multimodal data fusion can create personalized, data-driven interventions for better mental health outcomes.

About Dr. Amir Rahmani:

Dr. Amir Rahmani is a Professor of Nursing and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where he also holds the Samueli Endowed Chair of Integrative Health. He serves as the Co-Director of the UCI Institute for Future Health and leads the multidisciplinary HealthSciTech Group at UCI. His research spans mHealth, data science, wearable and mobile computing, machine learning and agentic AI, affective computing, and bio-signal processing. Dr. Rahmani's contributions have been recognized with the UCI Beall Applied Innovation’s inaugural Faculty Innovation Fellowship, the Nokia Foundation's Research Excellence Award, and the European Union’s Global Marie Curie Fellowship.

About the 2025 Society of Digital Psychiatry Symposium:

The 2025 Society of Digital Psychiatry Symposium is an event focused on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and mental healthcare. With this year’s theme, "Advancing Digital Mental Health Through AI," the symposium provides a unique platform for thought leaders and innovators to explore the latest AI advancements reshaping the mental health landscape.

Large language models often struggle to handle psychiatric emergencies safely. In this session, Dr. Benjamin W. Nelson, PhD presents the Verily Behavioral Health Safety filter (VBHSF), a specialized guardrail evaluated against clinical datasets to identify mental health crises in text-based conversations. Dr. Nelson demonstrates the system’s high sensitivity and specificity compared to standard industry guardrails, emphasizing the need for clinically oriented AI performance to minimize missed crises.

About Dr. Benjamin W. Nelson:

Dr. Nelson is a Senior Clinical Research Scientist at Verily Life Sciences on the Science and Innovation Team, an Adjunct Professor at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and a licensed psychologist. He leads Verily’s mental health science and innovation efforts, advancing precision AI health strategies and developing generative AI–enabled safety systems and clinical decision support tools across the company’s mental and behavioral health portfolio. He also contributes to the Division of Digital Psychiatry at BIDMC, bringing integrated expertise in clinical care, AI, and applied research.

Read the full paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12083

About the 2025 Society of Digital Psychiatry Symposium:

The 2025 Society of Digital Psychiatry Symposium is an event focused on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and mental healthcare. With this year’s theme, "Advancing Digital Mental Health Through AI," the symposium provides a unique platform for thought leaders and innovators to explore the latest AI advancements reshaping the mental health landscape.

In this session, researcher and digital mental health expert Soumya Choudhary, MSc, PhD explores the unique challenges and opportunities of implementing digital mental health tools in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Focusing on the widening treatment gap in regions like India, she introduces the "Digital Clinic Model." This model integrates digital phenotyping, smartphone-based assessments, and the role of "Digital Navigators" to scale care for individuals with schizophrenia. Soumya highlights the importance of culturally grounded design and safety frameworks in resource-constrained environments.

About Soumya Choudhary:

Soumya Choudhary is a dedicated researcher and digital mental health expert currently pursuing a PhD in Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India. She is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Division of Digital Psychiatry, BIDMC, Harvard Medical School. Soumya holds a Master's degree in Mental Health: Research and Practice from the University of Nottingham, where she specialized in clinical psychology, neuropsychiatry and artificial intelligence. At NIMHANS, Soumya has been involved in Wellcome Trust-funded projects such as the SHARP study, focusing on smartphone-based assessments and relapse prevention in psychosis. Her research integrates advanced data analysis techniques and app-based interventions to enhance mental health care. Soumya has also published extensively in the field of digital mental health, with works exploring digital interventions, machine learning applications in mental health, and relapse prediction in schizophrenia. Soumya is passionate about scaling digital mental health solutions globally, with a focus on low and middle income countries.

About the 2025 Society of Digital Psychiatry Symposium:

The 2025 Society of Digital Psychiatry Symposium is an event focused on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and mental healthcare. With this year’s theme, "Advancing Digital Mental Health Through AI," the symposium provides a unique platform for thought leaders and innovators to explore the latest AI advancements reshaping the mental health landscape.