Tech Can Help Solve Our Mental Health Crisis. But We Can’t Forget The Human Element.

Tom Insel was the director of the National Institute of Mental Health from 2002–2015 and led the mental health team at Alphabet’s Verily. Tech alone can’t solve our mental health crisis, he writes.

Hi, and welcome back to Big Technology. This week we’re featuring an opinion piece from Dr. Thomas Insel, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, who went on to lead mental health at Alphabet’s Verily. He shares an important perspective about how the push for scale in mental health tech can conflict with some of the field’s fundamentals. Dr. Insel’s book, Healing: Our Path From Mental Illness To Mental Health, comes out on February 15. You can pre-order your copy here.

By Dr. Thomas Insel

When I left government late in the Obama era to join Google, I felt like I had entered a different universe. Since 2002 I had been Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, informally the “nation’s psychiatrist,” although not nearly as well-known as the “nation’s infectious disease expert,” my colleague Tony Fauci. As NIH Institute directors, we’d communicate with the public as part of our jobs. And as I…