The rising prevalence of mental illness has posed a growing global burden, with one in four people adversely affected at some point in their lives, accounting for 32.4% of years lived with disability. This has only been exacerbated during the current pandemic, and while the capacity of acute care has been significantly increased in response to the crisis, it has at the same time led to the scaling back of many mental health services. This, together with the advances in the field of machine learning (ML), has motivated exploration of how machine learning methods can be applied to the provision of more effective and efficient mental healthcare, from varied approaches to continual monitoring of individual mental health or identification of mental health issues through inferences about behaviours on social media, online searches or mobile apps, to predictive models for early diagnosis and intervention, understanding disease progression or recovery, and the personalization of therapies.

This workshop aims to bring together clinicians, behavioural scientists and machine learning researchers working in various facets of mental health and care provision, to identify the key opportunities and challenges in developing solutions for this domain, and discussing the progress made.