CASE: Efficient Curricular Data Pre-training for Building Assistive Psychology Expert Models
This addresses the limited availability of psychologists by providing an efficient tool for mental health screening, though it is incremental as it builds on existing NLP methods.
The study tackled the problem of identifying individuals needing urgent mental healthcare by developing an NLP pipeline, CASE-BERT, which uses curricular texts for pre-training and achieved f1 scores of 0.91 for Depression and 0.88 for Anxiety on forum data.
The limited availability of psychologists necessitates efficient identification of individuals requiring urgent mental healthcare. This study explores the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipelines to analyze text data from online mental health forums used for consultations. By analyzing forum posts, these pipelines can flag users who may require immediate professional attention. A crucial challenge in this domain is data privacy and scarcity. To address this, we propose utilizing readily available curricular texts used in institutes specializing in mental health for pre-training the NLP pipelines. This helps us mimic the training process of a psychologist. Our work presents CASE-BERT that flags potential mental health disorders based on forum text. CASE-BERT demonstrates superior performance compared to existing methods, achieving an f1 score of 0.91 for Depression and 0.88 for Anxiety, two of the most commonly reported mental health disorders. Our code and data are publicly available.