FigSIM: A Dataset for Fine-grained Suicide Severity and Figurative Language in Suicide Memes

The suicide is a terrifying act of a person who is misled by his own mental state. This problem arises across many countries. Sadly, Russia also has quite high number of persons who committed suicide. Luckily, a subset of these people writes their struggles in social media, allowing a way to find them and help. However, these valuable texts disappearing in many irrelevant texts which is considerably slowing down the decision process about person's suicidal risk. To tackle this problem, in this work we have presented a detailed methodology of building the dataset for detecting texts that describe presuicidal and anti-suicidal signals. This methodology describes the process of instruction and class table creation, the process of annotation, verification and post-annotation correction. Guiding by this methodology, we collect and annotate a large-scale Russian dataset with more than 50 thousand texts from social media. We provide a count statistic of the dataset as well as common problems in annotation. We also conduct basic experiments of building the classification models to show the on go performance on different levels of annotation. Furthermore, we make the dataset, code and all materials publicly available.

Suicide is a critical global public health challenge, causing approximately 720,000 deaths each year and calling for timely, effective prevention strategies. Existing computational studies primarily focus on post-based social media platforms such as Twitter and Weibo, leaving instant messaging environments such as Telegram underexplored. Yet group chats pose distinct challenges: messages are short, fragmented, multi-party, and often rely on implicit or culturally specific expressions, making isolated post-level analysis insufficient. We introduce SuiChat-CN, a Chinese group-chat benchmark for contextual suicide risk assessment. We collect public Telegram group-chat data, construct coherent conversational segments through signal-word extraction and bidirectional context expansion, and annotate user risk levels with an expert-validated, LLM-assisted paradigm. SuiChat-CN contains 13,312 contextual segments from 1,406 users, covering 258,228 raw chat messages. Extensive experiments with PLMs and more than 40 LLMs demonstrate that contextual information is essential for reliable risk assessment, while fine-tuning and partial-context evaluation further reveal the challenges of early detection in multi-party conversations. Due to ethical and sensitivity concerns, the dataset is not publicly released but will be shared with accredited mental health and suicide-prevention research institutions upon reasonable request.

Large language models are increasingly proposed for mental-health applications such as detecting suicidal content, raising the question of what they rely on. We study this mechanistically and use it to ask a narrower question: how to make a causal claim about a model's internal features more trustworthy. Our validation-gated framework, with suicidality detection as a case study, interprets a behavior only after the model is shown to perform it: a concept is admitted only once the model ranks it above a simple lexical baseline, and each subsequent property is tested against a matched control. This discipline yields negative as well as positive results. The gate rules out one task at the outset: on DeepSuiMind (Li et al. 2025), Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct cannot separate implicit suicidal intent from ordinary distress, so we do not analyze it. We turn to binary suicide detection, which it does perform. There we find a mid-network feature that appears semantic rather than keyword-based, is causally implicated in the decision (ablating it degrades the judgment; a random direction does not), is low-rank, and recurs across three model families and three suicide datasets. A register-matched control (suicide versus depression) suggests it tracks suicidality more specifically than general distress. Steering raises the model's response, but for unrelated questions too, so we treat it as necessary but not sufficient. The clearest pattern separates encoding from use: smaller models already represent suicidality, yet only larger ones appear to act on it. The positive evidence is English Reddit text, which limits the clinical reading.