IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021 - 80

AI for a Fair, Just, and Equitable World

Persuasive Technology
for Mental Health: One
Step Closer to (Mental
Health Care) Equality?
Tine Kolenik

Matjaž Gams

Jožef Stefan Institute, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School,
1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

Jožef Stefan Institute, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

 The increasing trend of mental health issues,
especially among younger people, is not a new phenomenon. World organizations, leaders, and decision-makers are recognizing its devastating effect,
resulting in mental health well-being appearing in goal
3 of the 17 UN sustainable development goals (SDGs)
[1]. Among mental health issues, stress, anxiety, and
depression (SAD) seem to be on the forefront-reaching 74% for disabling stress [2], 28% for anxiety disorder [3], and 48% for depression [4], in some groups.
What is more, between 76% and 85% of people in lowand middle-income countries receive no treatment
for their disorder [5], whereas the treatment coverage
for, for example, depression is only 33% in high-income countries [6]. Mental health issues have large,
multifaceted effects on the patient, on their immediate
surroundings (family or caretakers), and on the wider
society [7]. Individuals face decreased quality of life,
poor educational outcomes, lowered productivity
and potential poverty, social problems, abuse vulnerabilities, and additional health problems. Caretakers
face increased emotional and physical challenges as
well as decreased household income and increased
financial costs. Society faces the loss of several gross
domestic product (GDP) percentage points and

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2021.3056288
Date of current version: 16 March 2021.

billions of dollars annually, alongside with exacerbating public health issues and corrosion of social cohesion. All these lead to an increasingly stronger positive
reinforcement loop-SAD increasingly perpetuates
SAD. Too often, mental health issues directly result in
the worst possible outcome and loss of human life, as
many countries struggle with a high suicide rate [8].
It has been recognized that the reasons for increasing
SAD include a severe lack of mental health professionals and regulations [9] as well as unequal access
to mental health care [10]. These factors make the
field ripe for technological and other scientific therapy-based interventions, as individuals with mental
health issues prefer therapies to medication [11].
Given the vast advances in behavioral sciences
with regard to human decision-making and similar
phenomena [12] as well as the arrival of digital
technologies, AI, and big data, many societal efforts
have been put into creating technologies that
would help, motivate, guide, and affect people into
bettering themselves and the world around them
in various domains, especially those pertaining to
SDGs. Persuasive technology (PT), as it is called,
is designed for attempting to " change attitudes
or behaviors or both (without using coercion or
deception) " [13, p. 20]. It is largely used for behavior change, a phenomenon considered to have a
temporary or permanent effect on an individual's
behavior, attitude, and other mental states when
compared to their past [13]. PT is already widely

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021

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