September isn't just about pumpkin spice everything (though we're not judging if that's your thing). It's Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, and frankly, we need to talk about the elephant in the room—or should we say, the elephants plural, because there are several stomping around our collective mental health right now.
Let's be honest, 2025 hasn't exactly been a gentle ride. Between job markets that seem to change faster than TikTok trends, AI that's simultaneously promising to solve everything while making us question our purpose, and healthcare systems that sometimes feel like they're held together with digital duct tape and good intentions, it's no wonder our mental health is taking a hit.
And speaking of AI in healthcare—oh boy, where do we even start? While tech companies promise that artificial intelligence will revolutionize patient care, the reality is creating some serious mental health complications for both patients and providers. There is significant discomfort among Americans with the idea of AI being used in their own health care, and frankly, we get it.
Here's what's actually happening in our doctor's offices and hospitals: AI's increasing role risks dehumanization of patient care, as the emphasis on data-driven decisions may overshadow the empathy, trust, and personalized care traditionally provided by human clinicians. Remember when your doctor actually looked you in the eye instead of staring at a screen? Now add AI algorithms into the mix, and that human connection becomes even more elusive.
The "black box" problem isn't helping either. The "black-box" nature of AI algorithms further exacerbates this issue, as the lack of transparency in AI decision-making processes can undermine patient trust. Imagine being told your diagnosis came from an AI system that even your doctor can't fully explain. It's like playing medical roulette, except the stakes are your actual life.
Then there's the anxiety-inducing issue of reliability. Patients often express concerns about data security, device reliability, and the transparency of AI systems, which can hinder acceptance of these technologies. Nothing says "sleep well tonight" like wondering if the AI that recommended your treatment plan was having a good day or glitching like your smartphone.
For healthcare workers, AI is creating its own special brand of stress. They're caught between embracing technology that could help them work more efficiently and worrying about whether they're slowly being replaced by machines that don't understand the difference between a patient and a data point. AI raises issues such as the potential for dehumanization in care and reduced patient–provider interactions, creating a perfect storm of professional uncertainty and patient dissatisfaction.
With all that said, there is appropriate ways to use AI in healthcare and we will get to what we believe are real use cases.
In this newsletter, we're diving into technology's complicated relationship with healthcare—spoiler alert: it's messier than a those old ER TV programs that we grew up with. We'll also explore how you can be part of suicide prevention efforts, including the warning signs that could make all the difference in someone's life.
Talk to you soon, Yon Hardisty
In this issue:
Your September Survival (and Thriving) Kit:
Mental Health Moves that Actually Work
Don't Miss:
Wellness Wednesday's
When AI Meets Healthcare:
Promises, Perils, and the Path Forward
Beyond the Bridge:
Connecting People with Advanced Health Data
Watch This Webinar
Mind Over Madness: Managing Stress for a Healthier Workplace
Watch this pre-recorded webinar of Marco Ansaldo, a Wellness & Compliance Advisor, who dives into recognizing the difference between workplace stress and anxiety.
Both stress and anxiety are triggered when the brain perceives a threat. These threats can be physical—like an unsafe work environment—or mental, such as a tight deadline or workplace bullying. Even remote workers face stress from feelings of isolation or the pressure to be available after hours.
Perfect is the enemy of progress. That meditation app collecting digital dust? Use it for five minutes. That gym membership you've been guilt-tripping yourself about? Ten minutes of movement counts. Your mental health doesn't need perfection; it needs consistency.
Digital Detox (But Make It Smart)
You don't need to become a technology hermit, but maybe don't doom-scroll before bed. Try the 3-2-1 rule: no screens 3 hours before bed, no food 2 hours before, no work 1 hour before. Your brain will thank you.
Connection Over Perfection
Text that friend you've been meaning to reach out to. Join a community group. Volunteer somewhere. Human connection is like vitamins for your soul—you might not feel the effect immediately, but the deficiency will eventually catch up with you.
Physical Health Hacks for Busy Humans:
The Stealth Workout
Can't make it to the gym? Take meetings while walking. Do squats during commercial breaks. Park farther away. Your body doesn't care if your exercise happens in a fancy facility or your living room.
Nutrition Without the Neurosis
Forget the latest diet trend that requires a PhD to understand. Focus on adding good stuff rather than eliminating everything fun. More vegetables, more water, more foods that don't come with an ingredient list longer than a CVS receipt.
Sleep Like Your Life Depends on It (Because It Does)
Quality sleep is not optional—it's the foundation everything else is built on. Create a bedtime routine that doesn't involve screens, keep your room cool and dark, and yes, that means your phone charges outside your bedroom.
The Bottom Line
Mental health isn't a destination; it's a journey with rest stops, scenic routes, and occasional construction delays. Some days you'll feel like you're cruising on the highway of happiness, other days you'll be stuck in the traffic jam of existential dread. Both are normal.
Healthtek offers a variety of suicide prevention and mental health tools to help with these vital issues. We've also partnered with LivWell Partners, who offers suicide prevention training for the workplace using a combination of instruction, art, and wellness technology.
If you're struggling, remember that seeking help isn't a sign of weakness—it's a sign of intelligence. You wouldn't try to fix a broken bone with positive thinking alone, so why would you tackle mental health challenges without professional support?
Join us at 9:00 A.M. PT for Wellness Wednesday, where we help individuals cultivate mindfulness, relaxation, and focus. It's free to join, and we encourage everyone to offer this opportunity to your clients.
Change is one of the few guarantees in life. Friendships shift, schools change, family situations evolve, and sometimes loss shows up unexpectedly. For teens, these moments can feel overwhelming because they are already going through so many physical, emotional, and social transitions. While no one can erase the pain of loss or the stress of change, what makes the difference is resilience—the ability to adapt and keep moving forward.
When AI Meets Healthcare: Promises, Perils, and the Path Forward
The AI Healthcare Promise vs. Reality
You walk into your doctor's office feeling anxious, and instead of looking you in the eye, your physician turns to a computer screen where an AI algorithm has already "diagnosed" you. Welcome to 2026, where artificial intelligence promises to revolutionize healthcare—but threatens to strip away its humanity.
AI in healthcare isn't evil—it's like a brilliant intern who never sleeps and can process thousands of medical journals instantly. But that intern can't tell when you need reassurance, recognize desperation behind a forced smile, or understand that sometimes the most important diagnosis happens between the words you don't say.
The Risks We Can't Code Away
The Trust Problem
When patients don't understand how treatment decisions are made, trust evaporates. The "black box" nature of AI creates medical anxiety—not just about your condition, but about whether the machine making life decisions actually understands you. Would you trust a mechanic who couldn't explain why your car needed repairs?
The numbers don't lie: AI-related malpractice claims rose by 14% from 2022 to 2024, with patients suing over missed diagnoses and overreliance on AI without human oversight. Meanwhile, more than 60% of healthcare professionals have expressed hesitation in adopting AI systems due to lack of transparency and fear of data insecurity.
Here's what this looks like in real life: imagine getting diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening condition, and when you ask your doctor "How do you know?" they respond with "The AI says so." No explanation of what data points led to this conclusion, no insight into what the algorithm considered or ignored, no understanding of whether your unique circumstances were factored in. It's like being handed a verdict without seeing the evidence.
The problem gets worse when you consider bias. Undisclosed biases in training data have led to unequal performance across demographic groups, meaning AI systems might work great for some patients while failing others—and no one knows which category they fall into until it's too late. This creates a peculiar form of medical roulette where your treatment quality depends on whether you happen to match the data the AI was trained on.
Informed consent is crucial when using AI in healthcare, making transparency in AI systems vital for maintaining trust and ensuring patient safety. Yet many patients are never told when AI influences their care, let alone given the chance to understand how or why. It's the medical equivalent of being a passenger in a self-driving car with blacked-out windows—you're along for the ride, but you have no idea where you're going or how you'll get there.
The Empathy Gap
AI excels at pattern recognition but fails at reading the room. It can spot melanoma in photos but misses when "I'm tired all the time" is actually a cry for help about depression. This is particularly dangerous in mental health, where the difference between "I'm fine" and "I'm drowning" might only be visible in body language or the length of a pause.
Learning the signs of suicidal thought is rarely taught in medical school and doctors often treat the physical issues but not the mental dangers.
Healthcare professionals that take the time to discover both physical and mental health issues by asking questions about how they feel, work-life balance indicators, and overall mental stressors can improve overall health outcomes leading to better care.
The Over-Reliance Trap
Healthcare providers risk becoming too dependent on AI recommendations, dulling their clinical instincts. It's like using GPS so much you forget how to navigate—convenient until the technology fails and you're lost.
In efforts to see more patients, it's not unlikely that we will begin to see an over-reliance by doctors who lean to heavily on the recommendations of the technology. They key here is to manage the AI as single source of input, not as a solution without intervention.
The Healthtek Difference: Augmented Empathy
At Healthtek, we believe AI should amplify human care, not replace it. Our approach uses technology to help healthcare providers be more human, not less. AI is simply one tool among many that we deploy and we're extremely vigilant in aligning to human intuition and reasoning verses relying solely on machine learning systems.
We've recently released a new +Health Challenges app that focuses on both physical and mental health outcomes. It "challenges" each of us to drink more water, get more steps, make a kind gesture, and even read physical books to balance our human experience in a way that well...keeps us human. Relying too heavily on AI and other technologies creates imbalance of care and that's where we draw the line.
Built-in Humanity Checkpoints
Our mental health applications include "empathy checkpoints"—moments where AI specifically prompts human-to-human interaction. When systems detect potential suicidal ideation, they don't just flag risk; they create space for genuine connection.
Specifically, we offer Daily Check-In's that that helps us better understand a participants mental health that day leading to patterns of either joy or hopelessness. Each of us are unique and it's perfectly normal to "not be OK".
Another advantage we offer is "Discussions" where you can reach out, without judgement, to other friends and family who might be participating in the challenge with you—to share what is hard, going well, or simply not happening that day.
The key is balancing humanities little interactions with empathy, care, and guidance. Each valuable on their own merits, but together, can build a better care journey when working together.
Why Suicide Prevention Demands Human Touch
Suicide prevention exemplifies why human intervention remains irreplaceable. AI can identify risk factors, but connecting with someone in crisis requires something no algorithm possesses: the ability to convey genuine care and hope. While Healthtek offers a platform called Hope and Ari, we recognize that the technology, while incredible, is best used in conjunction with suicide prevention training.
That's why we've partnered up with the LivWell Partners team who are suicide prevention experts that offer workshops for employers to be better aware of signs of depression or even suicidal actions. LivWell Partners utilize the nationally recognized QPR training to help both managers and employees with Question, Persuade, and Refer—the three simple steps that can literally save a life in the workplace.
But here's what makes LivWell Partners different from your typical corporate training: they don't stop at just teaching you to spot the warning signs. Their comprehensive LivWell5+ program combines QPR's proven methodology with cutting-edge Hope technology that provides ongoing support and resources, plus therapeutic art initiatives that give people alternative ways to express what they can't put into words.
Think about it—when someone is struggling, they might not respond to traditional "let's talk about your feelings" approaches. But give them a canvas, some acrylic paint, or even just permission to create something meaningful, and suddenly there's a pathway to healing that bypasses all the usual barriers. It's suicide prevention that recognizes we're complex beings who need more than one-size-fits-all solutions.
LivWell Partners creates workplace cultures where mental health support is woven into the fabric of daily operations, where asking "Are you okay?" becomes as natural as asking "How's your weekend?" Because the best suicide prevention happens long before someone reaches a crisis point—it happens when people feel seen, supported, and valued every single day.
The Power of Presence
Someone contemplating ending their life doesn't need data analysis—they need to feel seen and valued. This requires authentic human presence that can't be programmed: the therapist who remembers your dog, the counselor who notices voice changes, the friend who shows up with pizza unasked.
Reading the Unspoken
Humans excel at understanding what people don't say. We recognize when "I'm fine" means "I'm falling apart," or when sudden calmness signals dangerous decisions. AI might learn patterns, but it will never understand the weight of silence or personal significance of specific phrases.
The Path Forward: Better Together
The future isn't choosing between AI and human care—it's creating partnerships where technology enhances our humanity.
We're developing AI that helps providers spot issues earlier and access information faster, so they can spend more time doing what they do best: connecting with humans. Some healthcare aspects remain sacred: end-of-life conversations, delivering difficult news, suicide prevention—these require irreplaceable human compassion and presence.
The Bottom Line
At Healthtek, we're not replacing healthcare providers with machines. We're giving them superpowers—better-informed decisions made faster, so they can spend more time being authentically human with patients.
Healing isn't just fixing what's broken—it's helping people feel whole, valued, and hopeful. That requires a human touch.
Remember: Technology is a powerful tool, but empathy is the ultimate healing algorithm.
Beyond the Bridge
Connecting People with Advanced Health Data
After discussing AI's risks in healthcare, let's flip the script. What if artificial intelligence—when used thoughtfully—could become mental health's greatest ally? Not by replacing therapists and doctors, but by giving them superpowers they never knew they needed.
The key lies in understanding AI's role as the ultimate research assistant, pattern-spotter, and early warning system. It's not the star of the show—it's the incredibly talented supporting actor that makes everyone else shine brighter.
AI can analyze speech patterns, text communications, sleep data, and behavioral changes across thousands of patients to identify suicide risk factors invisible to the naked eye. Imagine a system that notices when someone's texting patterns change subtly—shorter responses, longer delays, different word choices—and flags this for a healthcare provider. Not to diagnose, but to prompt a human conversation that might not have happened otherwise.
Smart wearables could detect physiological signs of severe anxiety and gently suggest coping strategies or prompt users to reach out to their support network. For many people, the hardest part isn't treatment—it's admitting they need help. AI-powered chatbots, like Ari, provide that crucial first step, offering anonymous, judgment-free initial support that connects them to human professionals when appropriate.
Healthcare professionals can leverage AI as a diagnostic wingman. Before a patient arrives, AI analyzes recent communications and appointment patterns to provide crucial context—not conclusions. Dr. Sarah sees that John's AI analysis shows increased isolation behaviors and sleep pattern changes. She doesn't need AI to diagnose depression; she needs it to help her ask the right questions during their conversation. During appointments, AI provides real-time suggestions for follow-up questions and flags concerning patterns that warrant immediate human attention.
The future applications are even more promising. AI could predict wellness opportunities—noticing you're happiest on days with morning sunlight, exercise, and social interaction, helping you stay well instead of waiting for sickness. It could democratize quality mental health insights worldwide, giving someone in a remote area AI-powered preliminary assessments while connecting them to human professionals when needed. Future systems could analyze workplace stress patterns to suggest organizational changes that support mental wellness rather than expecting humans to adapt to toxic environments.
In suicide prevention specifically, AI serves as an early warning system that identifies subtle behavioral changes—like an incredibly attentive friend who notices when something's different. During mental health emergencies, AI could offer proven de-escalation techniques and breathing exercises while simultaneously alerting human professionals. It ensures people who've experienced suicidal ideation receive regular, personalized check-ins and seamless reconnection to human care when needed.
The guiding principles remain clear: AI informs, humans decide. Technology provides data; humans provide wisdom. People deserve transparency about when AI is used in their care, privacy is paramount for mental health data, and human connection remains sacred—the need for genuine empathy cannot be automated.
The future isn't about robot therapists or algorithmic doctors. It's about using powerful tools to make human care more effective, accessible, and compassionate. Imagine a world where no one's cry for help goes unnoticed, mental health support is available 24/7 everywhere, and prevention is prioritized over crisis intervention.
That's not a world where AI replaces human compassion—it's a world where technology amplifies our ability to care for each other in ways we never thought possible. The future of healthcare is human-centered AI: technology that makes us more human, not less.
At Healthtek, we're building AI systems that enhance human care without replacing it. Because the best technology doesn't eliminate the human touch, it makes it more powerful.
If you want to discuss how AI can impact your patients' care, please let me know.
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