TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bauer, Brian
AU  - Norel, Raquel
AU  - Leow, Alex
AU  - Rached, Zad Abi
AU  - Wen, Bo
AU  - Cecchi, Guillermo
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/5/16
TI  - Using Large Language Models to Understand Suicidality in a Social Media–Based Taxonomy of Mental Health Disorders: Linguistic Analysis of Reddit Posts
JO  - JMIR Ment Health
SP  - e57234
VL  - 11
KW  - natural language processing
KW  - explainable AI
KW  - suicide
KW  - mental health disorders
KW  - mental health disorder
KW  - mental health
KW  - social media
KW  - online discussions
KW  - online
KW  - large language model
KW  - LLM
KW  - downstream analyses
KW  - trauma
KW  - stress
KW  - depression
KW  - anxiety
KW  - AI
KW  - artificial intelligence
KW  - explainable artificial intelligence
KW  - web-based discussions
AB  - Background: Rates of suicide have increased by over 35% since 1999. Despite concerted efforts, our ability to predict, explain, or treat suicide risk has not significantly improved over the past 50 years. Objective: The aim of this study was to use large language models to understand natural language use during public web-based discussions (on Reddit) around topics related to suicidality. Methods: We used large language model–based sentence embedding to extract the latent linguistic dimensions of user postings derived from several mental health–related subreddits, with a focus on suicidality. We then applied dimensionality reduction to these sentence embeddings, allowing them to be summarized and visualized in a lower-dimensional Euclidean space for further downstream analyses. We analyzed 2.9 million posts extracted from 30 subreddits, including r/SuicideWatch, between October 1 and December 31, 2022, and the same period in 2010. Results: Our results showed that, in line with existing theories of suicide, posters in the suicidality community (r/SuicideWatch) predominantly wrote about feelings of disconnection, burdensomeness, hopeless, desperation, resignation, and trauma. Further, we identified distinct latent linguistic dimensions (well-being, seeking support, and severity of distress) among all mental health subreddits, and many of the resulting subreddit clusters were in line with a statistically driven diagnostic classification system—namely, the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP)—by mapping onto the proposed superspectra. Conclusions: Overall, our findings provide data-driven support for several language-based theories of suicide, as well as dimensional classification systems for mental health disorders. Ultimately, this novel combination of natural language processing techniques can assist researchers in gaining deeper insights about emotions and experiences shared on the web and may aid in the validation and refutation of different mental health theories. 
SN  - 2368-7959
UR  - https://mental.jmir.org/2024/1/e57234
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2196/57234
DO  - 10.2196/57234
ID  - info:doi/10.2196/57234
ER  -