Knowledge-augmented Agentic AI for Mental Health Medication Information Seeking
This work addresses the need for auditable, source-aware integration of patient narratives and regulatory data for psychiatric medication information, which is critical for reducing nocebo responses and non-adherence.
The paper develops a provenance-aware, knowledge-graph-based multi-agent framework that integrates 466,525 Reddit posts, 60,782 WebMD reviews, and 20 years of FDA adverse event data for nine antidepressants. It finds that patient-generated data form a partly independent safety signal, with adverse events appearing in community sources hundreds of days before FDA reports for sertraline.
Patients increasingly seek medication information online, yet safety knowledge for psychiatric drugs is split between regulatory adverse-event records, which are authoritative but abstract, and patient narratives, which are experience-near but unvalidated. Integrating them without conflating evidence and anecdote is especially consequential in psychiatry, where poorly contextualised information can amplify fear, nocebo responses, and non-adherence. Here we develop a provenance-aware, knowledge-graph-based multi-agent framework unifying 466,525 Reddit posts, 60,782 WebMD reviews, and twenty years of U.S. FDA Adverse Event Reporting System records for nine antidepressants. A large-language-model entity-recognition pipeline benchmarked against physician annotations reached highest F1 scores of 0.969 for medications and 0.973 for conditions. The two community platforms were far more concordant with each other (overlap up to a Jaccard similarity of 0.905) than with regulatory reports, indicating that patient-generated data form a partly independent safety signal. For sertraline, many adverse events appeared in community sources hundreds of days before the corresponding FDA date. A Neo4j knowledge graph grounded in ATC-N, ICD-10, and MedDRA vocabularies preserves provenance, keeping every claim traceable and regulatory facts distinct from patient experience. These results establish source-aware integration as a route to more auditable psychiatric medication information, with usefulness and patient benefit to be tested prospectively.