The Future of Artificial Intelligence in Mental Health Nursing Practice: An Integrative Review.
Lucian H Milasan, Daniel Scott-Purdy
PMID 39844734WHAT IT FOUND
AI tools for mental health nursing showed potential in assessment, risk detection, prediction and service efficiency, but across 78 studies most evidence was early-stage and not ready to replace nurse judgment.
Key findings
01AI applications were grouped into five potential areas for mental health nursing: assessment, identification, prediction, optimisation and perception, but many included studies were early-stage and had limited generalisability.
02AI medication-adherence checking reported 89.7% accuracy versus 71.9% for modified directly observed therapy, but the review said current AI assessments cannot be implemented without addressing ethical and procedural complexities.
03Clinicians were cautious about AI alerts: nurses reported lower comfort with AI-based clinical applications than other professionals, and 94.12% of clinicians surveyed wanted to know which patient characteristics drove a suicide-risk flag.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
This is a review of potential, not a trial of AI in nursing care; many included studies were early-stage and not yet validated in real services. Limited generalisability was a recurrent issue in 33 articles (42%), often because of small samples or narrow clinical settings. The review included only English-language studies published after 2014, so work from under-represented settings may be missing. Distinguishing mental health nursing from psychiatry, clinical psychology and psychotherapy was difficult, so some relevant mental healthcare evidence may have been excluded. Ethical issues such as bias, privacy, opaque algorithms and patient involvement were under-researched in the included studies. Perceptions studies included nurses and students, which is useful but does not show that AI improves patient outcomes.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that AI tools are ready to replace mental health nurses or make risk decisions on their own. The review found potential, but many included studies were early-stage, many had limited generalisability, and the authors said current AI assessments cannot be implemented without addressing ethical and procedural complexities.