IOWA CITY, Iowa — After tragedy struck his swimming community, Iowa City West High School senior Winston Fan turned to technology for answers.
“In the state of Iowa for our swimming community, we’ve had over three suicides in the past four years. One of those being on our swim team, and it greatly impacted the way we run things in our community,” Fan said. “I wanted to see what I could do with AI and help reduce the wait for patients, while also aiding psychologists in diagnosing and supporting patients faster. That’s kind of what started our research.”
Seeing firsthand the lack of mental health resources and the long wait times for appointments, Fan teamed up with his father, University of Iowa Tippie College of Business professor Patrick Fan, to develop an AI tool designed to assist mental health providers.
The system analyzes conversations and flags language that may indicate mental health concerns, helping providers diagnose patients more quickly and efficiently.
Patrick Fan explained the project’s potential impact: “I feel this is going to be one of those things that potentially make an impact to society and also going to be transformative as well. I provided technical guidance as Winston worked on his project, but he did a lot of his own research and development.”
To train the AI, Winston and Patrick used publicly available posts from mental health communities on Reddit, labeling content to help the model learn patterns linked to anxiety, depression, and other disorders.
The resulting tool achieved an F1 score of 86%, a metric reflecting high accuracy in identifying mental health indicators.
Looking ahead, the father-son team plans to expand the research.
“I’m basically assembling a team of doctoral students who are going to continue this journey,” Patrick Fan said. “We will make this tool and the model publicly available so any psychologist, social scientist, or mental health provider can use it, build on it, and continue helping patients.”
For Winston, the goal has always been personal and community focused.
“It would mean the world to see these suicide rates go down or the diagnosis process to be more accurate and successful,” he said. “I want my research to make a difference in the real world and help my community, especially the swimming community that this all started from.”
The project has already received recognition, winning the Congressional App Challenge, highlighting the potential of AI to address pressing mental health challenges.