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. This panel has actively shaped the study’s design and informed consent protocols. In a pioneering effort for Indian mental health research, the study has embedded a 15-member panel of Lived Experience Experts – individuals who have survived depression, anxiety, or substance use disorders – across every phase of the project.
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. They will also participate in language-evaluation groups across all targeted Indian languages, audit AI algorithms for hidden bias and stigmatising language, and stress-test systems before deployment, the doctor said.
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.
HEADS instead builds for Indian languages from day one, developing artificial intelligence that understands clinical conversations in Kannada, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, and English,” Dr.
Shukla told The Hindu.
“In our earlier research, we found that even frontier models cannot understand or translate Indian languages, especially when discussion was about feelings and emotions.
