arXiv:2608.29010v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: People share mental health diagnoses on social media, yet how such language becomes visible around their self-disclosure, and whether community engag...
By Renkai Ma, Lingyao Li, Shanting Chen, Chen Chen, Fan Yang, Yuanyuan Lei
The paper introduces the COmmunity-centered Peer Engaged Support (COPES) dataset and a three‑axis evaluation framework to gauge how well Large Language Models (LLMs) align with community perspectives on mental‑health support queries. Experiments show that fine‑tuning LLMs on COPES improves strategy alignment and emotion‑tone alignment by over 50% for general‑purpose models, yet these gains are uneven across subreddits and coping strategies. The study also finds that post‑training shifts the model’s recommendations toward problem‑focused advice while reducing emotion‑focused responses, indicating persistent disparities in performance across different communities and needs.
By Mohit Chandra, Nabin Kim, Eli Min, Aamogh Sawant, Tanmay Sutar, Munmun De Choudhury
arXiv:2607. 05685v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used as private, always-available conversational systems, but little is known about how people with depressive symptoms use them.
By Neil K. R. Sehgal, Dunigan Folk, Lyle Ungar, Sharath Chandra Guntuku
The study investigates how large language models (LLMs) assess psychological distress in online posts from six identity‑based communities. Through a perspectivist annotation task, 321 participants provided 9,587 judgments on 1,198 Reddit posts, revealing modest in‑group agreement (OR = 1.18) that varies across communities. When evaluated against these community‑specific labels, open‑weight LLMs consistently over‑estimate distress—achieving only 31–44% accuracy on posts perceived as none‑to‑mild—while newer models like GPT‑5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro show similar inflation, whereas Claude Opus 4 is more conservative.
"whyItMatters":"The findings highlight that miscalibrated distress detection by LLMs can disproportionately impact the very communities they aim to serve, underscoring the need for equitable AI deployment in mental‑health contexts."
By Andrew Aquilina, Xiang Lorraine Li, Yu-Ru Li
The study analyzes how mental health self‑disclosure on Twitter changed after Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition, examining 824K tweets related to anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and suicidal ideation. Using LIWC and an LLM‑based intimacy classifier, researchers found a post‑acquisition decline in affective and social language, a rise in first‑person singular pronouns and future‑focused expressions, and varied intimacy patterns across conditions—low‑intimacy disclosures increased for anxiety, depression, and BPD, while high‑intimacy disclosures rose for suicide‑related posts. Only the moderate‑versus‑low intimacy decline for BPD remained statistically significant compared to broader Twitter discourse.
By Olivia Pal, Yunhao Yuan, Meghana Mandava, Talayeh Aledavood, Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Koustuv Saha
arXiv:2409.02244v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used as ad hoc therapists. While prior research has found that LLMs outperform human coun...
By Zainab Iftikhar, Sean Ransom, Amy Xiao, Nicole Nugent, Jeff Huang