How a Psychologist Brings Clinical Judgment to AI for Psychiatry with Sophie Klarskov Petersen

What does a clinician actually do inside a startup building AI for mental health? In psychiatry, the most important clinical data is not a lab value. It is a patient’s story, told across long sessions and many visits, and that changes what a good clinical tool has to do.

Host Helen Tanner talks with Sophie Klarskov Petersen, a psychologist and the clinical product manager at Aisel Health, a Copenhagen startup building an operating system for psychiatric care. Sophie explains how she turns clinical workflows into product decisions, why she sometimes has to be the one who asks “should we?” when the tech team has already shown "we can,” and what she has learned about earning the trust of clinicians who are cautious about AI.

This is the show’s first conversation with a psychologist, and its first with a guest building outside the US.

In this episode:

• What a clinical product manager does, and why workflow knowledge is the core of the job
• Why mental health data arrives as a story, and what that means for AI built for psychiatry
• How AI can take on documentation without taking over clinical judgment
• Learning to stay in the problem before jumping to a solution
• Being the voice of patient safety when an idea is technically possible but clinically questionable
• How to earn trust from clinicians who are curious about AI, and from those who are skeptical
• Sophie’s one piece of advice for clinicians joining a team building mental health AI

Resources mentioned:

• Aisel Health: https://www.aisel.co/
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj

Connect with Sophie Klarskov Petersen:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophieklarskov/
• Aisel Health: https://www.aisel.co/

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