Matt Lewis is on a mission to make mental health more actionable with a big assist from generative artificial intelligence.

AI150 member Lewis is now CEO of LLMental, which was founded to leverage AI to augment mental wellness. LLMental has two businesses, a B2C enterprise, Rhythmental, leveraging AI to address depression and other mental health challenges, and TransforMental, a B2B enterprise focused on prioritizing workplace wellbeing. LLMental started as a venture designed to enable startups to address health and life sciences challenges. Today, LLMental is focused on augmented mental wellness with the aim of operating multiple businesses addressing various challenges.

Here's a look at the takeaways about LLMental and its approach to mental health.

Focus. Lewis said LLMental is taking a future view of the challenges humans will face over the next few years. "We drew up a list of 17 thorny problems that have perennially gone unsolved and are areas that don't really have any real innovation in them and could potentially benefit from AI native consideration for people that struggle with those challenges," said Lewis.

Lewis said that LLMental chose to focus on quality of life and the intersection of mental health. "In serious mental illness, the conversation has really been about harm avoidance, but that's often where the conversation ends," said Lewis. "But how's your actual quality of life? What's your decision-making capability look like? What are your social relationships? Have you gotten back to the person you were before you were first diagnosed with depression?"

"There's been little assistance for the person who is suffering to go from diagnosed to a design for recovery."

As a result, LLMental is looking to use generative AI and machine learning to help people progress from diagnosis to remission and ultimately recovery to build a better life, he added.

Previously: AI 15O's Matt Lewis on GenAI adoption, psychology and life sciences

The engagement model. Lewis said LLMental's approach revolves arond everyday engagement, but in a way that's not like talking to ChatGPT. The goal is to take a beginner's mind approach to how mental health conditions are treated. LLMental is designed to fill in those moments where you can't get to a therapist or clinician.

Lewis said:

"You'll probably see your psychiatrist, maybe once every three months for about an hour. You'll see a therapist, maybe once every six weeks for an hour. That total time with a clinician adds up to about 24 hours per year, or maybe about one day of every 365 days. On the other 364 days, you're literally left alone, unsupported, with no engagement, no resources and no information. You're just in your head torturing yourself all the time."

LLMental is designed to be a copilot for your mind that can help you architect the life you're meant to live. It's something that helps you scaffold the types of interventions or activities that are helpful, peer reviewed and evidence based to improve your quality of life."

The idea is that patients can get hyper personalized interventions base on various contexts--weather, work, family obligations.

The platform. Lewis said the platform will be gated for people diagnosed for depression and verified with medical records. "That's both a safety and trust consideration so people on the platform know they're only talking to other people like themselves that have their best interests at heart," said Lewis.

LLMental will also offer life plans that are personalized and curated that can contextually adjust based on responsibilities. Think more Spotify than ChatGPT. Lewis said:

"It's not an avatar. It's not a chat bot, per se. It's more of an assistive consideration to help people figure out what they should do and when they should be doing it instead of doom scrolling on social media, which is not helpful. They're doing things that are useful for their mind and for their other relationships that help them progress and build by 10% improvement every day."

LLMental has nearly 2,000 experiences, interventions and activities that have been curated around social interaction, people and roles and purpose. The organizing principles in part revolve around the research of Thomas Insel, who wrote a book Healing about the path from mental illness to mental health. Insel was Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, led the mental health team at Verily and co-founded Mindstrong Health and Vanna Health. "Insel realized what really changes mental illness is this social cure and mix of people, purpose and place," said Lewis.

The tech stack. LLMental is being built on multiple models depending on the use case. "Generative AI does a great job of helping patients come to terms with stages, readiness adoption and meeting them at their level so they can internalize and actually do something," said Lewis. He said LLMental is still being built and later models will have new benefits. "We're evaluating the right path as we go to market and scale up, but it's about summarization and contextualization for a person dealing with a number of challenges," said Lewis. "You need it to be simple, easily understood, annotated and evidence based. If we're doing our job right the user doesn't really see the AI."

Enterprise use cases. While LLMental is focused on serious mental health conditions the company is also homed in on enterprises. The B2B side of the company is TransforMental and that business is focused on companies trying to adopt AI and address transformation; the thesis is that if the leaders of the organization are overly anxious that they won’t have jobs when the transformation is complete, productivity will plummet in the short term and the business will suffer in the long term.. Lewis said:

"Enterprises have the best intentions with trying to adopt AI, but truth be told, it's not going very well in a lot of places. There are some standouts where pilots and POCs do turn into scalable success, but they are exceptions. They're anomalies. There are many more failures than successes. It is our thesis that AI adoption is not succeeding are human factors. This is in the human computer interaction space and the human factor consideration is almost entirely psychological."

Lewis said he has seen organizations where humans were concerned about losing jobs and that fear hampered adoption. When enterprises have a good culture, growth orientation and robust mental health, transformation is adopted faster with better business outcomes. "TransferMental is designed for the mental health wellbeing side of transformation," said Lewis.

More on data, AI and healthcare transformation:

Business Research Themes

Data to Decisions, Future of Work, Next-Generation Customer Experience

Roles

Chief Information Officer, Chief People Officer

Tags

#AI #artificialintelligence #machinelearning #ML #generativeAI