The Forgotten Body in Digital Mental Health: Why Culture, Embodiment, and Human Connection Must Shape the Future of AI-Assisted Care
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Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping digital mental health care through chatbots, predictive analytics, mobile applications, digital phenotyping, and large language model–based support systems. These tools promise scalability, personalization, and improved access in contexts where mental health services remain scarce or fragmented. Yet the dominant imagination of AI-assisted care often treats distress as information to be classified, monitored, and responded to, while overlooking the embodied, cultural, relational, and moral conditions through which suffering is experienced and healing becomes possible. This editorial argues that the future of AI-assisted mental health care must not be organized around technical efficiency alone. Instead, it must be grounded in three neglected dimensions: the body as a site of affective and psychological life, culture as the interpretive frame of distress and recovery, and human connection as a core therapeutic mechanism rather than an optional supplement. Drawing on recent evidence from digital mental health, cultural adaptation, therapeutic alliance, embodied cognition, and AI ethics, this article proposes a human-centered and culturally responsive agenda for AI-assisted care. AI can support mental health systems, but it should not redefine care as frictionless automation. The next generation of digital mental health must be clinically safe, culturally situated, embodied, relational, transparent, and accountable.
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