Kenneth M. Colby; Psychiatrist Was Computer Therapy Pioneer
Dr. Kenneth Mark Colby, who merged his backgrounds in psychiatry and computer science to become a pioneer in computerized psychotherapy and artificial intelligence, has died at the age of 81.
Colby, who created early computer programs to aid the depressed and the speech-impaired, died April 20 at his Malibu home.
A good computer therapy program, he assured naysayers, was simply the “ultimate self-help book.” Replacing a flesh-and-blood therapist with an electronic one was no worse, said the psychiatrist, who began practicing in the heyday of psychoanalysis, than the now outmoded analyst of that period who rarely spoke to a patient except to say the hour was up.
Educated at Yale and its School of Medicine, Colby practiced psychiatry for 20 years but became increasingly interested in the developing field of computer technology.
His first foray into combining the two came in the late 1960s, when he was working at Stanford University under a career scientist research fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health. Heading a team of graduate students, Colby created PARRY, a computer model of paranoid thinking, in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
He developed more sophisticated computerized psychology products, refining his fascination with computer comprehension and utilization of human language, during his tenure from 1974 to 1990 as UCLA professor of both psychiatry and computer science.
In the 1970s, Colby created what he called an “intelligent speech prosthesis” to aid the more than 500,000 stroke victims a year left with varying degrees of speech impairment.
Although he failed to obtain National Institutes of Health money or other funding to miniaturize his invention, Colby successfully built a one-of-a-kind laboratory model consisting of a voice synthesizer and computer, including keyboard and screen. But his device added up to $10,000 in commercially available components, weighed 30 pounds and had to be carted around in a shopping cart. Colby successfully tested it by having a double-stroke victim take it to restaurants and the supermarket to vocalize what she wanted to buy.
“It has to be developed further,” he told The Times in 1978, “if it’s to be of any help to the people who need such a device. Otherwise it’s going to remain a one-of-a-kind laboratory curiosity developed by some ivory-tower professor.”
In the 1980s, as computers became more affordable, Colby turned his attention to what he had yearned to do since the 1950s--utilize the machines to treat the about 90% of people with mental illness who never seek professional help, either because of cost or social stigma.
With the assistance of his computer programmer son Peter, he created the personal computer program, first dubbed “Overcoming Depression,” that sold for $200. Later renamed the Good Mood Program, with a price tag of $99, the system has been used by Veterans Affairs, the Navy and Kaiser Permanente and has sold thousands of copies.
After his retirement from UCLA a decade ago, Colby and his family started Malibu Artifactual Intelligence Works to refine and market that program and a second program, PC Guru, which can discuss interpersonal relationships with the computer user.
The controversial “Overcoming Depression” program combined a text-based tutorial, cognitive therapy techniques and an opportunity for the user to type in comments for a free-association exchange with the computer. Type in, for example, “How will you help me?” and the program would issue the text, “It is my job to help you learn to help yourself.”
Far more sophisticated than other early computer therapy programs, which seemed more like tests with only yes or no answers permitted, Colby’s program still had conversational limitations.
Syndicated Computer File columnist Lawrence J. Magid, testing it in 1990, typed, “I think I would feel better if I were thin,” only to obtain the response, “Why are you thin?”
Little wonder he wrote for The Times and other publications: “If you weren’t crazy when you start using it, you’re likely to be driven there by the way the program responds.”
But Colby defended the glitches, insisting that users “even like the program’s mistakes. As a patient, the doctor is in control. Here you can laugh at its mistakes.”
As health insurance programs cut therapy fees, he predicted, many therapists would employ computer programs to enable them to see several patients an hour instead of one.
A highly rated chess player, Colby wrote two books on chess and 10 books and more than 100 articles on psychotherapy and artificial intelligence.
Colby is survived by his wife, Maxine, son Peter, daughter Erin Johnson, and two grandsons.
