Organizations: George Mason University, USA · Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland · University of Minnesota, USA
Abstract
Detecting mental health disorders in a timely manner is an important societal challenge. NLP and machine learning (ML) methods used to assist with detection rely on data collected primarily from social media. However, such datasets often have sampling biases and inherent ethical and privacy issues. One avenue to overcome these limitations is non-social media data. We present the first comprehensive review of non-social media, free-text datasets for mental health research. We use the PRISMA methodology to conduct our survey and we review datasets available in multiple languages. We find that non-social media free-text based datasets are predominantly focused on English and on detecting depression. These datasets also vary in demographics, platforms, data types, annotation techniques, and methodologies. This systematic review also reveals key gaps and highlights opportunities to develop more diverse, reliable and clinically-relevant resources.
The growing availability of online support groups has opened up new windows to study mental health through natural language processing (NLP). However, it is hindered by a lack of high-quality, well-validated datasets. Existing studies have a tendency to build task-specific corpora without collecting them into widely available resources, and this makes reproducibility as well as cross-task comparison challenging. In this paper, we present a uniform benchmark set of four Reddit-based datasets for disjoint but complementary tasks: (i) detection of suicidal ideation, (ii) binary general mental disorder detection, (iii) bipolar disorder detection, and (iv) multi-class mental disorder classification. All datasets were established upon diligent linguistic inspection, well-defined annotation guidelines, and human-judgmental verification. Inter-annotator agreement metrics always exceeded the baseline agreement score of 0.8, ensuring the labels' trustworthiness. Previous work's evidence of performance on both transformer and contextualized recurrent models demonstrates that these models receive excellent performances on tasks (F1 ~ 93-99%), further validating the usefulness of the datasets. By combining these resources, we establish a unifying foundation for reproducible mental health NLP studies with the ability to carry out cross-task benchmarking, multi-task learning, and fair model comparison. The presented benchmark suite provides the research community with an easy-to-access and varied resource for advancing computational approaches toward mental health research.
Early detection of mental health disorders is often limited by the lack of specialized resources in Spanish and the difficulty of analyzing long histories of social media posts. This paper addresses these challenges through three main contributions. First, we introduce three Spanish foundational models specifically adapted to the mental health domain through domain-specific pre-training. Second, we propose Incremental Context Expansion (ICE), an automatic relabeling methodology designed for early detection. ICE identifies the point at which cumulative messages provide enough evidence of a disorder, generating more informative training samples. Third, we provide a set of fine-tuned models using the samples generated with the ICE methodology for early risk detection tasks. Our results on three Spanish benchmarks show that combining these specialized models with ICE improves the state-of-the-art, reducing detection latency while maintaining high performance. All models are publicly available.
Andreu Casamayor-Segarra, Vicent Ahuir, Antonio Molina-Marco +1
AI and large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising tools to address global mental health challenges. Despite the global nature of these challenges, there remains a critical shortage of high-quality datasets for training and evaluating such systems. To mitigate this gap, researchers increasingly generate synthetic clinical personas to simulate user data and test digital mental health support systems. However, most validated personas rely on English-centric contexts. This paper investigates whether similar persona-based methods can be used to generate multilingual mental health datasets. We modified nationality and language parameters in personas to generate clinical dialogues in Mandarin, Bengali, and Hindi. We then examined how different LLMs perform when evaluating the depression severity of these generated multilingual datasets against the baseline in English. Our findings indicate that just adding nationality and language parameters in personas might not be adequate, as it can introduce clinical inconsistency across languages. LLM judge models often exhibit inaccuracies in assessing depression severity in non-English texts, with performance varying across different models. This exposes the systemic limitations of applying English-centric personas to multilingual contexts. Ultimately, our work highlights the urgent need for culturally responsive data generation to ensure equitable mental health systems globally.