ProMind-LLM: Proactive Mental Health Care via Causal Reasoning with Sensor Data

TL;DR

ProMind-LLM introduces a novel framework combining objective sensor data with subjective mental records, utilizing causal reasoning and domain-specific pretraining to improve the reliability and interpretability of mental health risk assessments.

Contribution

It presents an integrated approach with a self-refine mechanism and causal reasoning, advancing mental health assessment by leveraging both behavioral data and LLMs.

Findings

Significant performance improvements over general LLMs on real datasets

Enhanced interpretability through causal chain-of-thought reasoning

Robustness achieved by combining subjective and objective data

Abstract

Mental health risk is a critical global public health challenge, necessitating innovative and reliable assessment methods. With the development of large language models (LLMs), they stand out to be a promising tool for explainable mental health care applications. Nevertheless, existing approaches predominantly rely on subjective textual mental records, which can be distorted by inherent mental uncertainties, leading to inconsistent and unreliable predictions. To address these limitations, this paper introduces ProMind-LLM. We investigate an innovative approach integrating objective behavior data as complementary information alongside subjective mental records for robust mental health risk assessment. Specifically, ProMind-LLM incorporates a comprehensive pipeline that includes domain-specific pretraining to tailor the LLM for mental health contexts, a self-refine mechanism to optimize the processing of numerical behavioral data, and causal chain-of-thought reasoning to enhance the reliability and interpretability of its predictions. Evaluations of two real-world datasets, PMData and Globem, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, achieving substantial improvements over general LLMs. We anticipate that ProMind-LLM will pave the way for more dependable, interpretable, and scalable mental health case solutions.