Can Israeli AI fix the global mental-health crisis?

Across Europe — especially in the United Kingdom and France — the demand for psychiatric care far exceeds the number of available psychiatrists, leaving patients to endure long delays and limited access. In some places, the wait can stretch beyond a year.

Research is clear: the sooner people struggling with mental health challenges receive treatment, the better their chances of recovery. Early intervention can prevent suicide in extreme cases, reduce the risk of self-harm, and improve daily functioning, productivity, and quality of life. A new artificial intelligence–driven platform may help reshape this reality.

Taliaz Health had begun tackling the global mental-health gap, piloting its technology in the United Kingdom and France with promising results. When the October 7 war erupted in Israel, the company quickly shifted focus at home, partnering with local resilience centers to support communities in crisis.

Almost two years later, after testing in resilience centers in northern and southern Israel, and more recently through Maccabi Health Services, the trauma-treatment technology is showing encouraging results. Advocates believe it could transform the country’s mental health care landscape.

Mental health care requires more than managing symptoms, especially when those symptoms don’t tell the full story. It depends on combining clinical insight with a broader view of the individual, including biology, medical history, and lifestyle.

That is the idea behind the Taliaz platform and its Predictix technology. Rather than replacing clinicians, the system is designed to support them. The AI powered platform offers tools for patient triage, queue management, resource allocation, and quality control, helping health systems function more efficiently.

The process begins with a comprehensive initial evaluation, which patients can complete from home with little to no waiting time. A case worker then reviews the results and generates a data-driven report for a clinician, enabling faster, more tailored treatment.

“You’ll start out by answering a questionnaire, and then you can schedule an appointment,” explained Dr. Dekel Taliaz, a neuroscientist and the founder of Taliaz. “You’ll meet with a social worker or psychologist who will become your focal point, collect additional information, and prepare everything for the doctor. Then, your next meeting will be with the psychiatrist, and he or she will already have a lot of information that is important to them so they can focus on the diagnosis and treatment.”

(Illustration: Shutterstock AI)

All of these meetings take place online. Taliaz employs a team of psychiatrists and care professionals who can respond within days rather than months. These experts recommend appropriate medications or psychological interventions and assess the urgency of each case.

Since the war broke out in October 2023, Taliaz has played a central role in providing immediate psychiatric support to thousands of Israelis displaced from their homes in the South and North. Working with the country’s Resilience Centers, the company has delivered personalized treatment in under a week — what many families describe as lifesaving.

So far, more than 5,000 patients in Israel have used the service, including about 4,000 from the Gaza envelope, and over 21,000 sessions have been conducted. Taliaz is a science and technology company with roots in brain research. Dr. Taliaz’s studied at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he studied the molecular mechanisms of psychiatric disorders.

“What we are trying to do is bring science and technology into the mental health field,” Dr. Taliaz told The Media Line. “We designed an end-to-end, AI-based platform to provide solutions for psychiatric disorders, but we are mainly focused on solutions for psychiatrists.”

When the company first began, the vision was to address the trial-and-error problem that often accompanies prescribing medication for mental health conditions. Typically, if a patient is diagnosed with depression, for example, a doctor prescribes a medication without knowing whether it will be effective. The patient then takes the drug for about a month before anyone knows if it works. For roughly two-thirds of patients, the first medication does not help, forcing them into a frustrating cycle of trial and error.

“We started by saying that we need to learn from the trial and reduce the errors,” Dr. Taliaz explained. “So, we started to apply machine learning algorithms and AI solutions. We started developing algorithms.”

As the company continued to grow and work with psychiatrists, the challenge became clear: the wait. Long wait-lists prevented many clinicians from even starting treatment. Dr. Taliaz said this is not just a problem in Israel, but a global one.

“That [was] when we decided to expand the system to provide our AI-based solutions from the triage, meaning that directing the patient to the right treatment,” Dr. Taliaz explained. “It collects all the data for the caregiver and summarizes it, and then the caregiver can meet the patient with a lot of information that is essential for the clinical decision. It saves time for the caregiver, and the treatment decisions are better the first time.”

Using this new platform, psychiatrists can see more patients in less time. After October 7, the demand for psychiatric support in Israel surged, and Dr. Taliaz adapted quickly.

“After October 7, people needed psychiatric solutions, especially the people who were evacuated from the south and from the north to the hotels and had terrible experiences. We [were] there for them,” he said. “Together with the Resilience Centers, we provided psychiatric services that allowed people to go back to life as soon as possible.”

Maccabi patients now have access to the platform as well. Those who use the health fund can be referred to Taliaz by their primary care provider or select Taliaz directly from the list of doctors available through the Maccabi app or website helping them avoid the months-long wait typical of the standard system.

The feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive, Taliaz said. Approximately 90% of patients report satisfaction with the service, compared to about 50% of those who go through the regular system.

One patient, referred to only as E., who sought mental health support during cancer treatment, described his experience. Living in central Israel, he said his health fund initially left him without a response despite his eagerness to get help. He told The Media Line that after signing up for Taliaz, he immediately received a call.

“It was much faster than the health fund could make it work,” E. said. “Taliaz got me both a sociologist and a psychiatrist who helped me with drugs.” E. added that while he can only speak for himself, the service was effective, and that “they are real professionals.” Patients who use Taliaz can also use an app to monitor their treatment, receive updates, and get digital support and check-ins from the clinical team between sessions

The company is currently in talks with other health funds and hopes to expand the system nationwide. In addition, people working with the Resilience Centers can use the platform, and private patients have the option to pay for care directly. “The mental health field hasn’t really changed in the last 30 to 50 years,” Taliaz noted.

While his company has been leveraging AI for a decade, Dr. Taliaz said he believes the technology is finally reaching a tipping point. This shift may be especially powerful in Israel because high-quality, anonymized data is more readily available through the health funds and the Health Ministry. This data feeds the models, and the country’s openness to innovation creates fertile ground for new solutions.

Dr. Taliaz concluded: “It’s not as simple as it sounds, but it’s definitely something that will change the field over the next few years.”

The story is written by Maayan Hoffman and reprinted with permission from The Media Line.