CARMA: Comprehensive Automatically-annotated Reddit Mental Health Dataset for Arabic

TL;DR

This paper introduces CARMA, the first large-scale, automatically annotated Arabic Reddit dataset covering six mental health conditions, enabling improved detection and analysis of mental health issues in Arabic-speaking populations.

Contribution

The creation of CARMA provides a comprehensive, annotated dataset for Arabic mental health research, addressing resource scarcity and enabling new classification and linguistic analyses.

Findings

CARMA surpasses existing datasets in scale and diversity.

Classification experiments show promising results for mental health detection.

Linguistic analysis reveals distinct markers for different conditions.

Abstract

Mental health disorders affect millions worldwide, yet early detection remains a major challenge, particularly for Arabic-speaking populations where resources are limited and mental health discourse is often discouraged due to cultural stigma. While substantial research has focused on English-language mental health detection, Arabic remains significantly underexplored, partly due to the scarcity of annotated datasets. We present CARMA, the first automatically annotated large-scale dataset of Arabic Reddit posts. The dataset encompasses six mental health conditions, such as Anxiety, Autism, and Depression, and a control group. CARMA surpasses existing resources in both scale and diversity. We conduct qualitative and quantitative analyses of lexical and semantic differences between users, providing insights into the linguistic markers of specific mental health conditions. To demonstrate the dataset's potential for further mental health analysis, we perform classification experiments using a range of models, from shallow classifiers to large language models. Our results highlight the promise of advancing mental health detection in underrepresented languages such as Arabic.