Caroline Figueroa

Abhishek Kuber, Enrico Liscio, Ruixuan Zhang et al.

Rising mental health issues among youth have increased interest in automated approaches for detecting early signs of psychological distress in digital text. One key focus is the identification of cognitive distortions, irrational thought patterns that have a role in aggravating mental distress. Early detection of these distortions may enable timely, low-cost interventions. While prior work has focused on English clinical data, we present the first in-depth study of cross-lingual and cross-register generalization of cognitive distortion detection, analyzing forum posts written by Dutch adolescents. Our findings show that while changes in language and writing style can significantly affect model performance, domain adaptation methods show the most promise.

Paul Blum, Enrico Liscio, Ruixuan Zhang et al.

Suicide is a leading cause of death among adolescents (12-18), yet predicting it remains a significant challenge. Many cases go undetected due to a lack of contact with mental health services. Social media, however, offers a unique opportunity, as young people often share their thoughts and struggles online in real time. In this work, we propose a novel task and method to approach it: predicting suicidal ideation and behavior (SIB) from forum posts before an adolescent explicitly expresses suicidal ideation on an online forum. This predictive framing, where no self-disclosure is used as input at any stage, remains largely unexplored in the suicide prediction literature. To this end, we introduce Early-SIB, a transformer-based model that sequentially processes the posts a user writes and engages with to predict whether they will write a SIB post. Our model achieves a balanced accuracy of 0.73 for predicting future SIB on a Dutch youth forum, demonstrating that such tools can offer a meaningful addition to traditional methods.