PsyGUARD: An Automated System for Suicide Detection and Risk Assessment in Psychological Counseling

Huachuan Qiu, Lizhi Ma, Zhenzhong Lan


Abstract
As awareness of mental health issues grows, online counseling support services are becoming increasingly prevalent worldwide. Detecting whether users express suicidal ideation in text-based counseling services is crucial for identifying and prioritizing at-risk individuals. However, the lack of domain-specific systems to facilitate fine-grained suicide detection and corresponding risk assessment in online counseling poses a significant challenge for automated crisis intervention aimed at suicide prevention. In this paper, we propose PsyGUARD, an automated system for detecting suicide ideation and assessing risk in psychological counseling. To achieve this, we first develop a detailed taxonomy for detecting suicide ideation based on foundational theories. We then curate a large-scale, high-quality dataset called PsySUICIDE for suicide detection. To evaluate the capabilities of automated systems in fine-grained suicide detection, we establish a range of baselines. Subsequently, to assist automated services in providing safe, helpful, and tailored responses for further assessment, we propose to build a suite of risk assessment frameworks. Our study not only provides an insightful analysis of the effectiveness of automated risk assessment systems based on fine-grained suicide detection but also highlights their potential to improve mental health services on online counseling platforms. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/qiuhuachuan/PsyGUARD.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.264
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4581–4607
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.264
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.264
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Huachuan Qiu, Lizhi Ma, and Zhenzhong Lan. 2024. PsyGUARD: An Automated System for Suicide Detection and Risk Assessment in Psychological Counseling. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4581–4607, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PsyGUARD: An Automated System for Suicide Detection and Risk Assessment in Psychological Counseling (Qiu et al., EMNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.264.pdf
Software:
 2024.emnlp-main.264.software.zip
Data:
 2024.emnlp-main.264.data.zip