Reading Our Minds

"Psychiatry's clinical exam is a conversation that begins with, "Can you help me understand what's going on?" But two psychiatrists might observe the same patient and disagree about how to help. How can psychiatry define reliable data to ensure it makes good decisions? In other words, is a conversation the best we can do? In the last hundred years, practically every field of medicine has progressed in immense and unforeseeable ways, largely by the development of clinical technologies. To share in this progress, psychiatry must move beyond conversation and adopt sensors, numbers, and algorithms in clinical practice. Changes in a patient's online behavior, activity, sleep pattern, geolocation, facial expression, and speech pattern can provide a wealth of measurements. These data are already used by Big Tech to understand our likes and dislikes to sell us products, yet psychiatry lags far behind in its adoption of Big Data to benefit patients. Daniel Barron, a psychiatrist who trained at the Yale School of Medicine, asks a provocative and important question: Is psychiatry scientific enough? At once pioneering and engaging, "Reading Our Minds" steps readers through a standard psychiatric exam and, through a real patient's case, introduces readers to a series of digital tools that might help revolutionize psychiatry, and bring the practice firmly into the 21st-century and into the fold of medical science"--