The ethical role of computational linguistics in digital psychological formulation and suicide prevention.

Martin Orr, Kirsten Van Kessel, Dave Parry


Abstract
Formulation is central to clinical practice. Formulation has a factor weighing, pattern recognition and explanatory hypothesis modelling focus. Formulation attempts to make sense of why a person presents in a certain state at a certain time and context, and how that state may be best managed to enhance mental health, safety and optimal change. Inherent to the clinical need for formulation is an appreciation of the complexities, uncertainty and limits of applying theoretical concepts and symptom, diagnostic and risk categories to human experience; or attaching meaning or weight to any particular factor in an individual?s history or mental state without considering the broader biopsychosocial and cultural context. With specific reference to suicide prevention, this paper considers the need and potential for the computer linguistic community to be both cognisant of and ethically contribute to the clinical formulation process.
Anthology ID:
2022.clpsych-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, USA
Venue:
CLPsych
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
17–29
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.clpsych-1.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.clpsych-1.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Martin Orr, Kirsten Van Kessel, and Dave Parry. 2022. The ethical role of computational linguistics in digital psychological formulation and suicide prevention.. In Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, pages 17–29, Seattle, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The ethical role of computational linguistics in digital psychological formulation and suicide prevention. (Orr et al., CLPsych 2022)
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