Your Loved One’s Psychiatrist Is Using AI. Does Anyone Know How?
A story in this week’s news should matter to every family navigating serious mental illness — yet most won’t see it.
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A new report from Behavioral Health Business landed this week with a headline that stopped me cold:
Behavioral Health Orgs Are Adopting AI Faster Than They Train Clinicians On It.
Here’s what that actually means.
The American Psychological Association recently found that 1 in 3 behavioral health practitioners now use AI monthly — a 29% increase from the year before. Ambient scribing tools that listen to your loved one’s appointment and write the chart note automatically. AI-assisted triage systems that flag which patients are at elevated risk. Predictive tools that scan electronic health records for patterns. Revenue cycle management systems that track prior authorizations and insurance claims.
These tools are already inside the clinics and practices where people with serious mental illness receive care. Right now. Today.
And according to the people running those organizations, the training to use them responsibly hasn’t kept up.
Industry professionals are describing a widening gap between how fast AI is being adopted and how prepared clinicians are to use it — to understand what it’s actually doing, where it helps, and critically, where it can fail. AI evolves so rapidly that even its developers struggle to keep pace. The computational efficiency of the large language models that power many of these tools has doubled roughly every five months since 2020. Clinicians who were trained on one version of a tool may be using something significantly different six months later.
Why This Matters for Your Family
Here’s the part that keeps me up at night — as a caregiver, and as someone who just wrote a book about technology in serious mental illness:
The AI in your loved one’s psychiatric care is not optional.
If their clinic uses ambient scribing, their appointments are being transcribed and summarized by AI whether they know it or not. If their practice uses predictive risk tools, an algorithm may be influencing how often they get contacted between appointments. If their EHR uses AI-assisted documentation, the notes their psychiatrist writes may be partially generated by a language model.
Families don’t get to opt out of tools they don’t know exist.
And that information asymmetry — where the system knows what technology is being used and families don’t — is one of the central problems I tried to solve in “Connected Care.”
What Informed Families Can Do
Understanding that AI is already inside psychiatric care changes what families can ask about at appointments:
– “Does your practice use ambient AI scribing? If so, who reviews the notes before they become part of the medical record?”
– “Are there any AI tools being used to monitor my loved one’s care between appointments? What data do they use?”
– “How does your team stay current on the AI tools you’re using — and what happens when those tools make an error?”
These aren’t adversarial questions. They’re the questions any informed healthcare consumer should be asking — and that most families have never thought to ask because they didn’t know the tools existed.
The families who ask these questions are better advocates. Not because they’re more suspicious, but because they understand the landscape their loved one is navigating.
The Bigger Picture
The Behavioral Health Business story is really about a transition that’s already underway — from a mental health system that operated almost entirely on human judgment to one where AI is increasingly embedded in documentation, triage, risk assessment, and care coordination.
That transition is not inherently bad. When AI reduces the documentation burden on a psychiatrist, that clinician has more time for the actual patient in front of them. When AI flags a patient at elevated risk before a crisis develops, that’s a life potentially saved.
But transitions this fast, in a field this consequential, require families to be informed participants — not passive recipients of care that’s being reshaped by technology they’ve never heard of.
That’s the whole reason I wrote “Connected Care.” Not to alarm families about AI. Not to celebrate it uncritically. But to make sure that families navigating serious mental illness have the same understanding of the technological landscape that the healthcare system already has.
Because the information gap between what the system knows and what families know — that gap costs people their health, their stability, and sometimes their lives.
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“Connected Care: A Practical Guide to Technology for Serious Mental Illness” is soon to be available on Amazon. For free resources, tools, and weekly updates, visit https://www.resourcesforsmi.com.
