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

TL;DR

PsyGUARD is an automated system designed to detect suicidal ideation and assess risk in online psychological counseling, utilizing a new taxonomy, a large dataset, and baseline evaluations to improve crisis intervention.

Contribution

The paper introduces PsyGUARD, a novel system with a detailed taxonomy, a large-scale dataset, and risk assessment frameworks for fine-grained suicide detection in online counseling.

Findings

Effective suicide ideation detection using the taxonomy and dataset.

Baseline models demonstrate the system's potential for risk assessment.

The system can aid in providing tailored responses for crisis intervention.

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.