ARIA hosts inaugural Mental Health Advisory Council workshop
Emergent themes reshape ARIA’s research program
ARIA convened its inaugural Mental Health Advisory Council (MHAC) workshop at the Santa Fe Institute on August 17, 2026. The invitation-only workshop brought a broad group of stakeholders together with ARIA leadership for a full day of in-depth discussions on the challenges and opportunities of applying AI to mental and behavioral health (MBH).
The workshop is part of ARIA’s Stakeholder Collaboration for Mental and Behavioral Health “Workstream.” Its purpose is to ground ARIA’s research agenda in real-world needs by opening a two-way dialogue between ARIA researchers and people on the front lines of MBH: patients, clinicians, families, policymakers and advocates.
Key ideas and related research questions that emerged out of the discussions included:
- Human experience is nuanced, social, and embodied. What are chatbots missing? Is it possible for AI to ever capture the full human experience?
- Interactions are dynamic and drift over time. How do we develop “crash test dummies” to stress test models on important scenarios before deployment?
- Trust is emergent and contextual. How do norms arise from an interaction? How do we maintain safe alignment while allowing for dynamism in a relationship?
These ideas were shared with the wider ARIA team at the institute’s second annual retreat which immediately followed the workshop (and which many of the MHAC attendees also participated) and resulted in a significant reorganization and refocusing of ARIA’s research program along the four current “Areas of Study” orkstreams.