Mental health and technology intersected at Yale School of Medicine on Feb. 22-24 as more than 150 people gathered to participate in HackMentalHealth’s first collegiate hackathon.
HackMentalHealth creates a forum for people to develop technology that can improve mental health, and several Yale Department of Psychiatry residents and faculty participated. They helped to organize and mentor teams, worked as judges, and pitched ideas for the new technology. Sixteen teams participated.
Eden Almasude, MD, MA, a first-year resident, was a member of the first-place team, “Flip.” Flip’s project was titled, “Changing the Narrative on Suicide.” The members developed an Internet browser extension that flags web content containing information known to support social contagion effects of suicide.
According to the team's blog post, “Once this content has been identified, Flip uses natural language processing to characterize its semantic makeup and find relevant articles that offer a more productive take on the same issue. Finally, Flip presents alternative options in the form of a browser notification, suggesting a way to flip the script on how we talk about suicide.”
Sofia Noori, MD, MPH, a second-year resident, and Eric Lin, MD, a third-year resident, helped organize the hackathon. Judges included psychiatry faculty Vinod Srihari, MD, and Seth Feuerstein, MD, JD. Michael Sernyak, MD, Professor of Psychiatry and CEO of the Connecticut Mental Health Center, was an advisor. Volunteer clinical mentors from psychiatry included Mario Fahed, MD; Rajiv Radhakrishnan, MBBS, MD; Kunmi Sobowale, MD; and Azim Munivar, MD.