Daniel Oberhaus, "The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum" (MIT Press, 2025)

Feb 4, 2025

Daniel Oberhaus, a science and technology journalist motivated by personal tragedy, discusses his book exploring AI's unsettling role in psychiatry. He reveals how AI promises accessible mental health care but risks creating a psychiatric surveillance economy that manipulates emotions. Oberhaus introduces 'swipe psychology,' revealing its dominance in mental health diagnostics. He critically examines the ethical implications of AI in mental health, cautioning against its implementation without rigorous evaluation of patient outcomes.

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ANECDOTE

Oberhaus's Personal Tragedy

Daniel Oberhaus's sister died by suicide in 2018, sparking his interest in AI's potential in psychiatry.
His initial hope was to find digital clues that could have prevented her death, but his research revealed alarming trends.

INSIGHT

Defining Mental Disorders

Psychiatry uses "mental disorder" to categorize symptoms, unlike other medical fields that diagnose based on biological markers.
The DSM's diagnostic criteria rely on symptom checklists and lack objective biological validation, leading to inconsistencies.

INSIGHT

Early AI and Psychiatry

AI and psychology's origins intertwined in the mid-20th century, with AI pioneers seeking to replicate human intelligence by studying the brain.
Early AI programs like ELISA and PERI explored human-computer interaction in therapeutic contexts, sparking debates about AI's role in mental health.

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AI psychiatrists promise to detect mental disorders with superhuman accuracy, provide affordable therapy for those who can't afford or can't access treatment, and even invent new psychiatric drugs. But the hype obscures an unnerving reality. In The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum (MIT Press, 2025), Daniel Oberhaus tells the inside story of how the quest to use AI in psychiatry has created the conditions to turn the world into an asylum. Most of these systems, he writes, have vanishingly little evidence that they improve patient outcomes, but the risks they pose have less to do with technological shortcomings than with the application of deeply flawed psychiatric models of mental disorder at unprecedented scale.

Oberhaus became interested in the subject of mental health after tragically losing his sister to suicide. In The Silicon Shrink, he argues that these new, ostensibly therapeutic technologies already pose significant risks to vulnerable people, and they won't stop there. These new breeds of AI systems are creating a psychiatric surveillance economy in which the emotions, behavior, and cognition of everyday people are subtly manipulated by psychologically savvy algorithms that have escaped the clinic. Oberhaus also introduces readers to the concept of “swipe psychology,” which is quickly establishing itself as the dominant mode of diagnosing and treating mental disorders.

It is not too late to change course, but to do so means we must reckon with the nature of mental illness, the limits of technology, and what it means to be human.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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