Perception of AI Use in Youth Mental Health Services: Qualitative Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has made significant advancements in health care. A key application of using artificial intelligence for health (AIH) is the use of AI-powered chatbots; however, empirical evidence on their effectiveness and feasibility remains limited. Objective: This study explored interest group perceptions of integrating AIH in youth mental health services, focusing on its potential benefits, challenges, usefulness, and regulatory implications. Methods: This qualitative study used semistructured in-depth interviews with 23 mobile health stakeholders, including youth users, service providers, and nonclinical staff from an integrated youths' service network. We used an inductive approach and thematic analysis to identify and summarize common themes and subthemes. Results: Participants identified AIH's potential to support education, navigation, and administrative tasks in health care, as well as to create safe spaces and mitigate health resource burdens. However, they expressed concerns about the lack of human elements, such as empathy and clinical judgment. Key challenges included privacy issues, unknown risks from rapid technological advancements, and insufficient crisis management for sensitive mental health cases. Participants viewed AIH's ability to mimic human behavior as a critical quality standard and emphasized the need for a robust evaluation framework combining objective metrics with subjective insights. Conclusions: While AIH has the potential to improve health care access and experience, it cannot address all mental health challenges and may exacerbate existing issues. While AIH could complement less-complex services, it could not replace the therapeutic value of human interaction at this time. Co-design with end users is critical for successful AI integration. Robust evaluation frameworks and an iterative approach to build a learning health system are essential to refine AIH and ensure it aligns with real-world evolving needs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".