This session explores the emerging role of artificial intelligence (AI) in mental health, considering its application both within mental health services and everyday use by the public. AI is already being trialled in areas such as digital triage, clinical decision support, mood monitoring, and therapy-adjacent tools, raising important questions about efficacy, safety, and integration with professional practice and the UK regulator NICE is appraising two interventions with LLM or AI components.

Alongside these developments, the ways in which lay people engage with AI also merit attention. Through everyday prompting, users can elicit supportive reflections or structure wellbeing routines, but poorly framed question alongside generic model training and the absence of "safety rails" may produce misleading or unsafe outputs or delay seeking professional help when necessary.

The session will situate these practices within broader debates about ethics and governance. Key issues include clinical reliability, data privacy, cultural bias, and the boundary between self-help tools and regulated interventions. By examining both institutional and informal uses of AI, this session highlights the promise of scalable, accessible support, while emphasising the need for robust evidence, regulation, and ethical safeguards in this rapidly evolving field.

Dr David Crepaz-Keay, FRSPH, is Head of Research and Applied Learning at the Mental Health Foundation, a 75 year old public mental health NGO. He leads the London based research team and is responsible AI, LLMs and knowledge management systems for the organisation.

Dr Crepaz-Keay is a former co-chair and now member of the ethics, policy and position committee of the International Society for Psychiatric Genetics and a fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health. He is an editor of the Journal of Mental Health Training, Education and Practice; the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Public Mental Health and the Handbook of Phenomenology, Values and Clinical Decision-Making in Personalised Mental Health Care. He has been a technical advisor for the World Health Organisation, senior mental health advisor to Public Health England, written a mental health module for the Open University, written, spoken and campaigned for improvements in mental health services.