HEADS to bridge India’s mental healthcare gap with AI

To address India’s alarming mental healthcare gap, NIMHANS in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, and the Lokopriya Gopinath Bordoloi Regional Institute of Mental Health (LGBRIMH), Tezpur, will formally launch a collaborative project titled ‘HEADS’ (Human-in-the-loop Evaluation of Assisted Depression Screening) on Thursday.

Funded by the Wellcome Trust, a major international charity foundation, the two-year study aims to build and evaluate AI-assisted approaches for the early identification and screening of depression. The initiative places a strong emphasis on Indian regional languages, specifically Kannada, Assamese, Hindi, Bengali, and English, which have historically remained substantially underrepresented in mental health AI research.

Lekhansh Shukla, assistant professor of psychiatry at NIMHANS and principal investigator of the project, said India carries one of the world’s largest depression treatment gaps, where only about one in five individuals affected by depression receives timely, appropriate care.