One of the most promising - and most terrifying - areas of medical research these days is technology designed to try to guess your mental health and predict what you'll do next.
Proponents of such tools say that they'll help doctors get to individuals in need faster and prevent tragedies like suicide, which claims the lives of more than 40,000 Americans each year, while others fear that such developments will lead to the nightmarish future of Minority Report.
Scientists took a major step forward in predictive technology this week with the development of a system of blood tests and an app that they say can predict with more than 90 per cent accuracy whether someone will start thinking about suicide or attempt it.
In a study published Tuesday, researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine presented details of an app that measures mood and anxiety and that asks people a series of questions about life issues, things like: How high is your physical energy and the amount of moving about that you feel like doing right now? How good do you feel about yourself and your accomplishments right now? How uncertain about things do you feel right now?
They purposely avoided asking any questions about suicide directly. Writing in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, the researchers said that "predicting suicidal behaviour in individuals is one of the hard problems in psychiatry, and in society at large."
