MIT News AI

Estimating suicide risk from text

A new language‑processing tool has been developed to estimate suicide risk from natural language. By analyzing text, the tool can identify individuals at the highest risk. This capability could enable faster and more targeted interventions.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

Assessing Suicide Risk in Arabic Crisis Helpline Calls: A Comparison of Arabic and English Large Language Models

The study evaluates large language models for assessing suicide risk in Arabic crisis helpline calls, comparing Arabic and English models. Using de‑identified transcripts from Lebanon’s National Lifeline, the researchers fine‑tuned instruction‑tuned LLMs and transformer encoders, achieving a macro‑F1 of 81.19 and ROC‑AUC of 90.61 for high‑risk calls in Arabic, and 85.00/92.59 in English. The results show that high‑risk calls are more distinguishable than at‑risk calls, and translating to English does not degrade performance, indicating potential for operator‑facing tools.

By Linhai Ma, Rita El Hachem, Mahatab El Hajj, Lilian Ghandour, Samah Fodeh
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Large Language Models in Mental Health: A Systematic Review of Applications, Innovations, and Ethical Challenges

The paper reviews how large language models are applied in mental health, covering areas such as social media analysis, clinical conversational agents, therapy support tools, prompt engineering, and multimodal learning. It synthesizes interdisciplinary studies that use social media posts, electronic medical records, and multimodal inputs to detect depression, assess suicide risk, provide personalized therapy, and generate psychoeducational content. The review also discusses advances in model interpretability, annotation strategies, multimodal fusion techniques, and highlights ethical, sociotechnical, and regulatory challenges while proposing frameworks for safe, equitable, and accountable deployment.

By Yisong Chen, Yifan Gao, Sijing Yu, Chuqing Zhao, Yang Lu
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Explainable Suicide Risk Assessment on Social Media with Multi-Task QLoRA

The paper presents a system for the IEEE BigData 2026 Cup on Explainable Suicide Risk Assessment on Social Media. It tackles three tasks—risk-level classification, evidence phrase extraction, and multi-label factor identification—using Qwen2.5-Instruct models adapted with quantized low-rank adaptation (QLoRA) and an answer-masked causal language-model objective. The final system achieved a composite score of 0.7738, with 0.8089 on Task 1 and 0.6919 on Task 2, demonstrating that task‑specific training and tailored aggregation improve performance across the three tasks.

By Xuan Zhong Feng, Geoffrey Martin, Hexin Dong, Yifan Peng
arXiv AI
Jun 24

One Year Later...The Harms Persist, But So Do We!

arXiv:2606. 23884v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: General-purpose large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for mental health-related conversations, yet safety safeguards remain inadequate and inconsistent across clinical conditions.

By Annika Marie Schoene, Cansu Canca, Gautham Vijay Kumar, Anson Antony
arXiv AI
Sep 15

K-Bench: a clinically calibrated benchmark for evaluating large language models in high-risk mental health conversations

arXiv:2609.15855v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: % !TEX root = ../main.tex People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) for mental health support, yet their safety in evolving, high-risk con...

By Laura M. Vowels, Matthew J. Vowels, Shivali Sharma, Apoorv Jha, Rehnuma Choudhury, Wasseem El Sarraj, Rachel Francois-Walcott, Aruba Hussain, Sarah Ingram, Angela Loulopoulou, Adva Segal, Elena Volkova