(Lateral comes from LTRL – Lay Therapy Research Lab)
http://www.lateraltherapy.org/
Overview
Outside of big cities in LMICs the treatment gap is near 100%, there are just no MH therapists or clinics. And yet lay therapy has been proven since the 1970’s by over 100 RCT’s to be as good as or even better than professional therapy. So why has it never been uptaken? Here’s what the WHO says in commenting on this strange reality, “Initiatives remain few and far between…the countries and communities that have seen real innovation and advances remain islands of good practice in a sea of need and neglect…For most of the world, the approach to mental health care remains very much business as usual”. If you want a romantic partner via zoom or AI, more power to you, but nothing beats IRL. And evidence supports that direct in person therapy is better, so to really effectively dent the 1 Billion humans with Common Mental Disorders, lay therapy is the primary path, with digital/zoom/text versions as important supplements and creators of first time awareness, like reading a romantic novel before actually having a relationship. So we will scale a lot of local teams giving therapy. Well since now you’ve got all these teams, what can you do with them?
Lateral has the unique idea to both implement mental health care through lay therapists in LMICs, but then invest tremendous energy to train them to become lay therapist researchers (LTRs) actively running ongoing pilots one after the other, guided by our Central Science Team (CST) that coordinates all the teams for our own research. The idea is we keep deploying new teams as funding allows, and soon you have 20, 50, 100, 1000 therapists in small teams doing therapy, bringing care, but also developing new ways to elicit and surface data, which will be collected and sent in to the CST for aggregation and analysis. We’ll use AI to record audio/video for analysis, which is the focus of the above research grant.
But that’s just data collection, now what to do with this richer trove of data? In the past lay therapists were just data collectors, typically filling out PHQ-9 style questionnaires to hand over to a visiting research team. Before I answer that…
Imagine two scenarios with 500K of research money:
One PhD researcher doing 20 therapy sessions per week and thinking through the data collected as they grapple toward some new iterative innovation.
— or —
100 lay therapist/lay researchers doing 2000 therapy sessions per week and engaging in guided multi-level brainstorming collective intelligence dialogs based on the aggregate data spurring one another on to create new iterative innovations.
That’s what we’ll do with the data. We have a multi-level guided brainstorm-collective-intelligence (BCI) system to spur one another on to come up with the next improvement to iterate in the next phase, and then repeat. 100 minds instead of 1. Not to mention non-Western minds, unencumbered by Western notions creating new therapies for the mostly non-Western rest of the world. And in this phase we’ll also research using AI models like Remesh or Pol.is famously used to analyze large population conversations in Taiwan elections, we’ll include it in our BCI dialogs and see how we can enhance them.
2000 therapy sessions per week, 8000 per month and it just keeps growing as we deploy more teams. Social Science loves large populations. The end goal is to help serve as a backbone catalyzing a global lay therapy movement by providing a basket of proven therapies to local community org’s all over.
Long-Term Additional Goal After Five Years Or So
To catalyze systemic change in global mental health by creating a scalable, evidence-generating permanent research platform available to researchers anywhere, and to develop regional research training centers for our most gifted researchers to go as an alternative way of producing PhD level researchers, modeled on an alternative education/research system with as much deep brainstorming collective intelligence (BCI) dialog as data collection and analysis, quickly iterating on many tries and tossing them out to try the next quickly, with an abundant pipeline of new approaches/ideas from all the BCI dialogging. Modeled on Adam Mastroianni’s Science House vision, which includes a creative reform of research paper writing to something far more useful and common sense.
Pilot Location
- Philippines – Southern island of Cebu, site of current operational pilot; We have five people in the Philippines, and five on our Central Team, as well as a growing advisory board and supporters from Happier Lives Institute and AIM and more.
Research, Data, and AI Tools
Organizations / Tools Referenced
- Pol.is – Tool for analyzing large-scale collective dialogue
- Remesh – AI platform for gathering and analyzing feedback
- Central Science Team (CST) – LATERAL’s internal research & analysis unit
- Custom AI & Machine Learning Tools – To analyze therapy session data; Language, sentiment, fidelity, facial detection, voice detection. We already have an early phase working lab prototype that sometimes prefers facial and voice inflection more than language, making it language agnostic as one angle to explore.
http://www.lateraltherapy.org/
Email Jeffrey Kursonis for more information on how to support this. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffkursonis/
