Automating PTSD Diagnostics in Clinical Interviews: Leveraging Large Language Models for Trauma Assessments

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel AI system that automates PTSD diagnosis from clinician interviews using large language models, aiming to improve mental healthcare access amid workforce shortages.

Contribution

It introduces a new framework leveraging GPT-4 and Llama-2 to automate mental health assessments from interview data, a first in fully automating such diagnostics.

Findings

LLMs show strong potential in aiding PTSD diagnosis.

The system achieves high accuracy on collected clinical interview data.

First AI system to fully automate mental illness assessments from clinician interviews.

Abstract

The shortage of clinical workforce presents significant challenges in mental healthcare, limiting access to formal diagnostics and services. We aim to tackle this shortage by integrating a customized large language model (LLM) into the workflow, thus promoting equity in mental healthcare for the general population. Although LLMs have showcased their capability in clinical decision-making, their adaptation to severe conditions like Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) remains largely unexplored. Therefore, we collect 411 clinician-administered diagnostic interviews and devise a novel approach to obtain high-quality data. Moreover, we build a comprehensive framework to automate PTSD diagnostic assessments based on interview contents by leveraging two state-of-the-art LLMs, GPT-4 and Llama-2, with potential for broader clinical diagnoses. Our results illustrate strong promise for LLMs, tested on our dataset, to aid clinicians in diagnostic validation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first AI system that fully automates assessments for mental illness based on clinician-administered interviews.