In a recent Psychiatric Times interview, Christoph Correll, MD, made a case that every psychiatrist should hear: Artificial intelligence should replace tasks, not people. He described a decision-support platform he helps lead at MedLink Global that would pull together the electronic health record, a short avatar-guided interview before each visit, and the conversation in the exam room, then offer two or three evidence-based treatment options. The goal, in his words, is to give clinicians “the whole 360 view.”
I agree with almost all of it. Repetitive history-taking does burn clinicians out. Measurement-based care is overdue in psychiatry. And I was glad to hear that the system is “barred from making a recommendation when information is insufficient,” and asks for the missing information instead of guessing.
But as the mother of someone living with serious mental illness, I noticed who was not in that 360-degree view. The family.
The view is built from an incomplete vantage point for schizophrenia
Every data source Dr. Correll described comes from the patient or the clinic: the chart, the patient’s own answers, the visit itself. For schizophrenia, that is often not enough.
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Many people with schizophrenia experience anosognosia, a lack of awareness that they are ill. It is not denial or stubbornness. It is part of the illness itself. A person in the early stages of relapse may answer a pre-visit interview honestly and still report that they are sleeping fine, taking their medication, and feeling well. A self-report screen will faithfully record what they believe. It will not record what their mother saw at 3 a.m.
Families see what the chart does not: the bedtime that drifted later every night for two weeks, the friend who stopped calling, the medication left in the bottle, the new conviction that the neighbors are listening. As a National Alliance on Mental Illness Family-to-Family facilitator, I hear the same story from families who saw a relapse coming and had no clear way to put what they knew in front of the care team.
The most important data happens between visits
There is a second gap. The platform Dr. Correll described sees the patient at intake and in the room. But relapse in serious mental illness rarely starts in the clinic. It builds in the weeks between appointments, through small shifts in sleep, activity, and social contact that add up before anyone can see them in a 20-minute visit.
The tools to capture some of that already exist. Smartphone-based sensing platforms used in schizophrenia research can pick up changes in sleep and mobility against a person’s own baseline. Simple mood and sleep trackers can produce reports a patient can share. But a 360-degree view that stops at the clinic door is not really 360 degrees.
Dr. Correll’s own guardrail makes the case
If the system is built to stop and ask questions when information is missing, then the people who hold that information should be part of the system. With the patient’s consent, ideally arranged while they are well, a family member could complete a short structured observation before each visit: changes in sleep, social withdrawal, medication concerns, new or unusual beliefs. That is exactly the kind of standardized, measurable input he is calling for. It simply comes from a different vantage point.
He also raised a fair warning about the field. A 2025 product review screened 84 potential AI decision-support products for mental health care. Only seven met its inclusion criteria, and the authors found just five scientific articles evaluating those products’ performance. As these tools are validated, families should be part of that work, too, as people who can say when the output does not match what they see at home.
Yes, and
Dr. Correll is right that AI should take on tasks that drain clinicians and that care should be measured, not guessed at. My ask is simple: When we build the 360-degree view, include the people who have been watching all along. For patients with serious mental illness, the family is often the part of the picture that changes everything.
Nicole Drapeau Gillen is a mother, advocate, and author who translates the fast-moving landscape of technology in serious mental illness (SMI) care into guidance families and clinicians can use. Thrust into caregiving for a loved one with SMI, with no direction on how to help, she turned that experience into a mission, writing two books and building an ongoing effort to bring families and clinicians into the conversation.
Her first book, Schizophrenia and Related Disorders: A Handbook for Caregivers, is a reference for every stage of caregiving, endorsed by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey as a must-read for SMI caregivers. Her second, Connected Care: A Practical Guide to Technology for Serious Mental Illness, maps apps, artificial intelligence tools, telepsychiatry, and brain-based treatments for a field moving faster than anyone can track. Dr. Akira Sawa, director of the Johns Hopkins Schizophrenia Center, has said the book “directly addresses” significant gaps.
