Google offshoot Verily loses top scientist (Tom Insel) leading its mental health project

Disappointing news here - I wonder what triggered the departure. I have to believe that the company was either not making progress fast enough, or moving in the wrong direction …

Verily Life Sciences, the high-profile Google offshoot, has lost the scientist who led its search for better ways to prevent, detect, and treat mental illness — the latest in a string of top executives who have left the company after a short tenure.

Dr. Thomas Insel, former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, joined the Silicon Valley startup with fanfare in December 2015. He was lured, he wrote at the time, by the Google philosophy to seek “a 10x impact on hard problems. I am looking forward to a 10x challenge in mental health.”

Verily confirmed the departure in a blog post Monday, saying, “We are bidding a fond farewell to Dr. Thomas Insel, who has helped shape our vision and to build a multidisciplinary team of mental health clinical researchers, data scientists, product designers, and software engineers, all passionately committed to rethinking the way we approach diagnosis and care in mental health. We look forward to carrying this vision forward!”

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Mental health is so complex. .people just dont realize the importance of mental health…

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Well the change in leadership could be a boon. We don’t know yet. Maybe the next person will know what to do a little better. Will say that I haven’t heard of verily before.

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Actually good news - he’s spinning out to do his own startup company to help move things forward in the field:

http://www.nature.com/news/former-us-mental-health-chief-leaves-google-1.21976?WT.mc_id=FBK_NatureNews&sf77595978=1

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Anybody that thinks that a cure can come from anywhere other than medicine is deluding themselves. These scientists like insel are purely out for profit. Once they saw how technology was advancing they sold their souls to make a buck.

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I just read the beginnig but it seems to me a sillines :joy:
If it’s difficult to undestand the behavior of a person being in front of she, due for her way to writte on the phone sems to me silly… If it’s that…

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Great… top scientist moves to making a mental health app :unamused:Just what we need…another widget

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Actually - Tom Insel is more of an administrator than a scientist (he was a scientist a long time ago but he’s been in “management” for many years now.

This is a really interesting area - its called “digital phenotyping” and the goal here is that perhaps by having an app that can characterize how people use their cell phone and how people move and socialize - they can identify if a person has a mental illness. For example, people who are depressed tend to be much less social, etc. - so this could be a very important area. In the future it may be that people download an app and it runs in the background and it identifies when you are more likely to relapse, or early on it might identify you at risk of depression, bipolar, or schizophrenia and recommend you go and get a mental health checkup before things get bad.

This could be good news.

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I doubt it, in mental health they even say it’s not the diagnosis that’s important rather the symptoms. I just don’t see this as very exciting, new meds are more exciting.

Here’s the list of therapies currently in development at Verily Life Sciences…

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They don’t seem to focus specifically on schizophrenia at this point…

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