VEILED‑SH is a new benchmark for evaluating AI responses to indirect expressions of suicide, self‑harm, and distress. It contains 10,003 prompts drawn from counselor chats, forum posts, platform searches, and triage, all grounded in Singaporean contexts and public datasets. The dataset uses an expert‑validated multi‑label taxonomy to classify intent, communicative function, and response behavior, and it includes six automated profiles calibrated to peer‑support practitioners and clinicians for proxy‑alignment scoring.
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...
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:2606. 28334v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and social media data have led to growing optimism about the ability to detect suicide risk at scale.
The paper introduces DistressBench, a benchmark comprising 718 English clinician-authored conversations covering 23 self-harm subcategories, each evaluated against a weighted rubric across seven crisis-support dimensions. Models are scored by the fraction of criteria they satisfy, revealing that the best models meet 88.4% of weighted criteria while clinicians achieve 98.7%. The study highlights gaps in crisis response, notably that 35.3% of conversations where crisis is recognized fail to route users to human help, underscoring the need to evaluate models on supportive care rather than mere refusal.
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.
arXiv:2606. 10380v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world crisis intervention is inherently conversational, yet existing research largely focuses on static texts.
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.
arXiv:2606. 19640v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI and large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising tools to address global mental health challenges.
arXiv:2606. 19637v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clinical NLP increasingly relies on electronic health record (EHR) data to detect suicidal behaviors, treating clinical documentation as more reliable ground truth than social media.
arXiv:2602. 05088v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Millions of people now use generative AI chatbots for psychological support.
The study examines how eight instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) handle suicidal ideation (SI) and self‑harm disclosures across three datasets, testing whether informing models of SI context or providing a clinician‑developed response protocol changes their behavior. Results show that baseline elevated risk in model responses is largely due to ignoring the disclosure and refusing to engage; informing models of SI or suppressing refusal increases engagement but does not reliably reduce risk and can even raise it. A clinician‑guided protocol, however, consistently lowers response‑level risk and reduces refusal, highlighting the importance of tailored safety mechanisms for SI contexts.
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.