Digital Technologies and Mental Health
Résumé
Rights to dignity and freedom of thought (mental autonomy) are fundamental human rights. They imply the fundamental right to mental health. The possibility that rights to dignity, mental autonomy and, as a consequence, mental health may be severely jeopardized by certain digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is recognized on a worldwide scale, yet, current legal frameworks are still struggling to carve out regulatory measures that fully take into accounting the impact of digital technologies and AI on mental health. This narrative review starts with a brief historic overview highlighting why internet and AI have taken the potential for individual and collective mental manipulation of former media of mass communication to the next level. In the current society context, dark patterns in commercial digital tools are cogently designed to manipulate consumer choices. Internet and social media platforms exploit AI to generate addictive trigger cues, fake contents, and deceptive interactions. Digital technology has hijacked our mental autonomy and represents an unprecedented threat to mental health and well-being, in particular of children and young individuals connected for long hours day and night as now officially recognized by international health organizations worldwide. The problem has already found expression in novel forms of compulsive behaviour and addiction (digital addiction) with related symptoms of anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, anhedonia, suicidal ideation. This article identifies psychological mechanisms likely to account for mental health deterioration in the digital age in terms of conditioned obedience to digital authority, de-individuation, pathological brain adaptation to chronic stress, reward deficiency syndrome (RDS), and learned helplessness. These mechanisms are non-conscious, deeply rooted in human neurobiology, and rely on the mechanism of psychobiological conditioning.
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