The social life of mental health chatbots
Fullam, Eoin (2024) The social life of mental health chatbots. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.
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Abstract
This PhD project is an analysis of automated mental health therapy, so called ‘mental health chatbots’. There are many kinds of mental health apps, but most claim to involve Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) or Mindfulness. My project is focused on CBT apps in general and CBT chatbots in particular. My research primarily concerns a smartphone-based mental health chatbot called ReMind, made by a company of the same name. The focus of my research is on the production of this technology. I am interested in what is going into this technology in terms of mental health/mental illness concepts, treatment styles, and the technical and economic conditions. The project covers a range of grounds: the history of computation, theories of subjectivity, analysis of therapeutic methods, and economic contextualisation feature in this work alongside ethnographic analysis. The aim of this project is to consider automated therapy from the perspective of ReMind - the software application and the company of the same name. It will rely on analysis of the app and ethnographic data gathered during fieldwork with ReMind. This is alongside analysis of other similar mental health chatbots, as well as looking at theoretical and journalistic material concerning chatbots, artificial intelligence, contemporary mental health treatment, and political economy. Drawing on historical and emerging scholarship on critical theory, science and technology studies, psychoanalytic theory and philosophy of computation, this project investigates the social life of mental health therapy applications and seeks to determine the underlying assumptions about subjectivity, consciousness and mental health that underpin them. I explore how these chatbots are on one hand produced in response to contemporary social, clinical, technical and economic conditions; and on the other hand, how they are conceptualised and put to work by their developers who have their own biases, assumptions and social conditions.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Thesis |
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| Copyright Holders: | The copyright of this thesis rests with the author, who asserts his/her right to be known as such according to the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. No dealing with the thesis contrary to the copyright or moral rights of the author is permitted. |
| Depositing User: | Acquisitions And Metadata |
| Date Deposited: | 22 Jul 2024 15:26 |
| Last Modified: | 23 Jul 2024 13:33 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/53874 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.18743/PUB.00053874 |
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