REVIEWS, EXCERPTS,
INTERVIEWS & COMMENTARY

Inside Higher Education 
In the New Year: 9 Spring 2025 University Press Releases

"On an altogether more dire note, Daniel Oberhaus’s The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum warns that the use of AI in psychiatry has shown “vanishingly little evidence” of improving patient outcomes. The problem is not one of engineering but of programming: The algorithms incorporate “deeply flawed psychiatric models of mental disorder at unprecedented scale,” posing “significant risks to vulnerable people.”

 

In old-school psychodynamic therapy, what’s said during the consultation does not leave the room. The author warns that a “psychiatric surveillance economy” is emerging, one “in which the emotions, behavior, and cognition of everyday people are subtly manipulated by psychologically savvy algorithms.”