I'm fairly certain that if a person is highly active on social media such a system could produce a better diagnosis than most people get when they see a professional, if only because the quality of psychodiagnosis is poor since it is often seen as a scam to satisfy insurance bureaucrats, common conditions are never diagnosed, there are fads for certain rare conditions, etc.
.. then the diagnosis of one of their problems sounds quite trivial.
1. "could" produce a better diagnosis. Not guaranteed. And better than what? How likely is it to really deliver a better result than appropriately trained specialists? 2. "scam to satisfy insurance bureaucrats". And you doing it digitally won't find its way to unintended recipients?
The undercurrent of this thread - and the original post - is growing awareness of the dystopian disaster that has grown out of "free" social media. So it's not surprising - to me, at any rate - that the general sentiment here is to be suspicious of any adjacent use.
What makes you so sure? (This is a serious question, not rhetorical.)
What I don't understand though is why do I also need to share my browsing history with faceless american corps that sell my data for profit. This sounds unnecessary for the main point (psychodiagnostic software).
Imagine how your tech could be used for evil and how profitable that would be. It could be a 2nd or even 3rd order effect, even.
[1] Film focuses on a college team building something they think is cool but really is a key part of a weapons system.
I'm not in the industry but I am very curious to know if we're already in the conditional-execution phase of surveillance/ad-serving/profile-updating: is there an idea [yet] of serving a challenge, and then both recording how/if it is engaged, with automated graph traversal to "look closer"... all offered stochastically...
The simple way to put that in part is, are we now getting A/B tests run on us explicitly, rather than merely implicitly?
(Personally, I'm 100% off Meta products and TikTok—but am leaking through LinkedIn and, regrettably, Google...)
Myself I have a condition which 5-10% of people have. As a child, I had two very high quality psych evaluations for the time where people observed all the signs and symptoms (particularly the first one) but failed to draw a line between them.
Since then I saw therapists maybe 6 times in 30 years (sometimes the same one) and it was always “adjustment disorder with …” and there was some truth in that in that in each case I had some very ordinary kind of stress which was exacerbating my condition but in reality there was always a chronic aspect to that.
I’ve known numerous people who have severe mental illness (way worse than the quirk that got me kicked out of elementary school) and contact with the psychiatric system and never got a conclusive diagnosis. The first line for a lot of people is to see a primary care practitioner and get diagnosed with either “anxiety” or “depression” and prescribe the same medication in either case. A referral to an actual psychiatric nurse practitioner who is taking patients is almost impossible in 2023 in the US never mind an actual psychiatrist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
This one is more positive but is checking that different diagnosticians get the same answer
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5980511/
and if that was applied to the "Thud" experiment you'd have poor diagnosis with a very high kappa (interrater agreement)