Online: Trending Now

The COVID-19 Pandemic brought about greater awareness of an even larger epidemic, one of loneliness in America. In higher education, it is incumbent on us to help our learners with overcoming the pain and other ill-effects of this condition.

The World Health Organization has staggering reports on mental health around the world:

In 2019, 1 in every 8 people, or 970 million people around the world were living with a mental disorder, with anxiety and depressive disorders the most common (1). In 2020, the number of people living with anxiety and depressive disorders rose significantly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Initial estimates show a 26% and 28% increase respectively for anxiety and major depressive disorders in just one year (2). While effective prevention and treatment options exist, most people with mental disorders do not have access to effective care.”

Earlier this summer, the US Surgeon General warned about the dangers of loneliness:

Loneliness is like hunger or thirst. It’s a feeling that we experience when something we’re lacking for survival is missing from our life. And if we respond to it, relatively quickly, it may go away. But just like hunger or thirst, it’s when it persists for a long period of time, when we’re not able to figure out how to address it, that is when we start to worry…. One in two adults in America are living with measurable levels of loneliness, but the numbers are even higher among young people.

The impact of loneliness is deep and far-reaching. It is not limited to brief episodes that lower energy and enthusiasm. Instead, the Surgeon General, in the same June interview with ABC, says, “We know now that when people struggle with things socially disconnected, over time, that it can have an impact on their mental health, increasing their risk for anxiety and depression, but also in their physical health, increasing their risk for heart disease, as well as dementia and premature death.”

The consequences of this affliction are very great. On-campus resources have been available for learners over the past decades. Mental health centers have refined their efforts to establish best policies and practices to assist those confronting such issues. Of students who participated in the U.S. News/Generation Lab poll and indicated they wanted mental health support:

77% were successfully connected to mental health care. Most of them – 70% – said they received resources for help right away or after about a week, while 7% had to wait more than three months. Students sought care for a range of reasons, such as anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicidal thoughts, substance abuse and trauma. Among survey respondents who received support, 69% felt it was sufficient.

However, with the growth of distance learning, comes the same problems, yet without the easy ability to meet face-to-face with those facing loneliness and resulting depression.

The University of Michigan Counseling and Psychological Services reports that nationally:

1. Suicide is the #2 leading cause of death for college students
2. Approximately 1,100 suicides on college campuses per year
3. 25% know of someone who has died as a result of suicide
4. 40% know of someone who has attempted suicide

The numbers on campuses are staggering, while the mental health data for online students at a distance are sparse. Those at a distance are not as closely monitored by the university as those on the campus. For many of these distant students, however, the pressures can be even greater due to factors such as isolation, family responsibilities, full-time workloads, and other challenges for which campus students have ready-access to support.

As a result, we are seeing an increasing role for rules-based AI chatbots to provide frontline and continuing support. In most cases, these tools utilize a far more restricted set of data than Generative AI (GenAI) bots to ensure that the responses are from highly-vetted, safe sources. They are most useful for those who are not in crisis, but who feel more comfortable interacting with a computer than with a person in seeking advice about very personal mental health topics.

One of the first such apps, Woebot, was initially developed by research psychologist and entrepreneur Alison Darcy in 2017. As CBS News reported earlier this year,

Woebot is a system based on rules that’s been very kind of controlled, so that way it doesn’t say the wrong things. Woebot aims to use AI to bond with users and keep them engaged. Its team of staff psychologists, medical doctors, and computer scientists construct and refine a database of research from medical literature, user experience, and other sources. Then, writers build questions and answers. And revise them in weekly remote video sessions. Woebot’s programmers engineer those conversations into code. Because Woebot is rules-based, it’s mostly predictable. But chatbots using generative AI, that is scraping the internet, are not.

The University of Maine Counseling Center has reviewed nearly two dozen free apps that may provide useful support to students seeking help with supporting their mental health. At the top of their list is “Mind Shift” that the center describes as “A great tool for anxiety available on iPhone and Android, developed by Anxiety BC. It teaches relaxation skills, develops new thinking, and suggests healthy activities. Designed for youth but useful to anyone.” Anxiety Canada is located in Vancouver, Canada, and was established in 1999. Anxiety Canada is a registered charity created to raise awareness about anxiety and support access to proven resources and treatment. The app utilizes “strategies based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to help you manage your anxiety.”

A series of studies from Harvard Business School are in the working paper titled AI Companions Reduce Loneliness By: Julian De Freitas, Ahmet K Uguralp, Zeliha O Uguralp and Puntoni Stefano that concludes:

From a societal point of view, the promising results found here suggest that AI companions could be a scalable tool for loneliness reduction against the backdrop of a severe loneliness crisis. Whether chatbots can help reduce loneliness has recently been the object of intense debate (Marriott and Pitardi 2024) and rigorous empirical evidence in this area was sorely needed. In a series of tightly controlled and high-powered experimental studies, we find compelling evidence that AI companions can indeed reduce loneliness, at least at the time scales of a day and a week.

It is encouraging that efforts are being made by many such responsible professionals and organizations in the field to develop AI tools that can help the nearly one billion people the WHO reports are affected. This is one of the areas of great potential for AI, but also one in which great caution must be taken. How is your university responding to the mental health needs of your distant, online students? Have you found ways to balance the good that might be done with the health dangers to individuals that may be caused by well-intended but inadequate or inappropriate responses?

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching & Learning blog.