2.8 Promotion of Public Interest and Societal Good

Most people would agree that new technologies in the mental health context should promote the public interest. Various proposals exist for guiding this aim; for example, with reference to public law values like community, freedom and equality, or general democratic values of access to information, democratic governance, civic participation, and so on.⁴¹¹ Others refer to international human rights law (which we will discuss in the next section), or internationally recognised labor rights,⁴¹² and some have pointed to broad ethical aims like ‘advancing human well-being’ as a ‘primary success criterion for development’ beyond technology simply being profitable, legal and safe.⁴¹³

Within the mental health context, broad concepts like ‘recovery-oriented support’ and ‘trauma-informed care’, which have strongly influenced mental health policy in recent years, might offer guidance for publicly-minded digital crisis support initiatives; so may guidelines for good mental health practices, such as those prepared by bodies like the World Health Organisation.⁴¹⁴

For the purposes of this report, we will briefly discuss two notable issues, which did not fit easily elsewhere in the report but which seem noteworthy. The first concerns the importance of face-to-face support and the risk of automation depersonalising care, and the second concerns the tendency of many technological approaches to home in on the individual, at the expense of more socio-economic understandings of mental health crises, distress and disability.