Statement of the Problem: The World is in a mental health crisis. Depression, which affects 300 million people across the world, is now the leading cause of disability worldwide, including 1.9 million children aged 3 to 17. Living in a toxic environment is the main reason why people are getting sick. Toxic relationships, insecurity, abandonment issues, controlling behaviour, boundary crossing just to cite a few, are some examples of how people neglect themselves and spread their inner negativity towards the environment, affecting the endocrine system and causing a drop in estrogen and progesterone levels which will increase the production of cortisol, the stress hormone. This is why mental health disorders are among the leading causes of mortality worldwide. (Kelland, 2018). The purpose of this study is to describe the experience of seeking help for mental health emergencies such as suicide risk detection among children who daily express a mental health struggle, preventing them for developing any disease and carry this throughout their adult life.

In the UAE one in every four people experience depression and anxiety concerning 5.1% of the population reaching the clinical criteria for diagnosis. (Yassin, 2022). What about children though? 1 in 6 children aged 2–8 years (17.4%) has a diagnosed mental, behavioural, or developmental disorder. That’s about five kids in every classroom. (Bitsko, 2016). This means that young kids are going to school but instead of focusing on the lesson, they focus all their energy on thinking about not waking up the next day or on that they’re alone in this World.

Maybe this happens because they are even afraid of talking to their parents who lack empathy, have excessively control towards their child's actions, manipulate or guilt-trip them, and behave unpredictably, switching between being affectionate and hostile and causing their children to live in a permanent state of anxiety, depression, PTSD, low self- esteem, and suicidal thoughts. (Jurewicz, 2015)

This way of thinking will lead them to potentially developing toxic stress and trauma, a stress that might have damaging effects on learning, behaviour, and health problems, including heart disease, diabetes, substance abuse, and depression, potentially destroying their neural network for good. Research also indicates that supportive, responsive relationships with caring adults as early in life as possible can prevent or reverse the damaging effects of toxic stress response.

The serious issue with all this process is that the 40% of adult mental illness starts when we are young, and half of those illnesses will be passed on to adulthood. A child exposed to this toxicity will most likely need help to take care of himself throughout all his life, where he can try to understand and solve his past childhood traumas, but will never be able to go back and live a happy and fulfilling childhood. The future of any society depends on its ability to foster the healthy development of the next generation. Extensive research on the biology of stress now shows that healthy development can be derailed by excessive or prolonged activation of stress response systems in the body and brain.

Thankfully, there is still a way out from this dark tunnel.

Orientation: Through AI assisted therapy professional psychiatrists can predict and prevent 50% of the mental illness that goes into adulthood, stopping them to develop furthermore. (Koetsier, 2023). After the system’s implementation, psychiatric admissions fell by eight per cent among those that the A.I. had identified as high risk, and documented suicide attempts in that group fell by five per cent. (Khullar, 2023). The project goal is to create “near real-time” modelling for early identification of at-risk kids, particularly for depression and suicidal thoughts.

One of the key resources is an unusual and more than a little unsettling collection. Doctors and mental health professionals can talk to patients, but they need to know what they’re looking for. And there are very definite signs of suicidal thinking, which a tool like this can help identify.

Findings: A couple thousand suicide notes were collected and then built natural language models off of those, and these are notes that people wrote just before they died by suicide. Those notes were taken and designed questions to ask kids, like “do you have secrets,” and “are you angry.” The answers are part of what the eventual AI model will use to determine if kids are at high, medium, or low risk of depression or other mental health challenges. It’s not just answers, however, that feed into the dataflow: it’s how people talk, how many pauses they insert between sentences, and the facial expressions as they converse. Through natural language processing and machine learning techniques it’s now possible to prevent even this thoughts from becomingaction. For every 100 thousand people completing treatment, 8-10 thousand get well through AI assisted therapy. (Blackwell, 2020).