An Exploratory Deep Learning Approach for Predicting Subsequent Suicidal Acts in Chinese Psychological Support Hotlines

TL;DR

This study introduces a deep learning model that improves long-term suicide risk prediction from speech data in Chinese hotlines, outperforming traditional methods and other models, with potential for clinical use.

Contribution

It presents the first application of deep learning to long-term speech data for suicide risk prediction in China, enhancing accuracy over existing manual assessments.

Findings

2.4% improvement in F1-score over traditional methods

Superior performance compared to eight popular models

Potential for clinical application in suicide prevention

Abstract

Psychological support hotlines are an effective suicide prevention measure that typically relies on professionals using suicide risk assessment scales to predict individual risk scores. However, the accuracy of scale-based predictive methods for suicide risk assessment can vary widely depending on the expertise of the operator. This limitation underscores the need for more reliable methods, prompting this research's innovative exploration of the use of artificial intelligence to improve the accuracy and efficiency of suicide risk prediction within the context of psychological support hotlines. The study included data from 1,549 subjects from 2015-2017 in China who contacted a psychological support hotline. Each participant was followed for 12 months to identify instances of suicidal behavior. We proposed a novel multi-task learning method that uses the large-scale pre-trained model Whisper for feature extraction and fits psychological scales while predicting the risk of suicide. The proposed method yields a 2.4\% points improvement in F1-score compared to the traditional manual approach based on the psychological scales. Our model demonstrated superior performance compared to the other eight popular models. To our knowledge, this study is the first to apply deep learning to long-term speech data to predict suicide risk in China, indicating grate potential for clinical applications. The source code is publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/songchangwei/Suicide-Risk-Prediction}.