Leveraging Embedding Techniques in Multimodal Machine Learning for Mental Illness Assessment

The increasing global prevalence of mental disorders, such as depression and PTSD, requires objective and scalable diagnostic tools. Traditional clinical assessments often face limitations in accessibility, objectivity, and consistency. This paper investigates the potential of multimodal machine learning to address these challenges, leveraging the complementary information available in text, audio, and video data. Our approach involves a comprehensive analysis of various data preprocessing techniques, including novel chunking and utterance-based formatting strategies. We systematically evaluate a range of state-of-the-art embedding models for each modality and employ Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Bidirectional LSTM Networks (BiLSTMs) for feature extraction. We explore data-level, feature-level, and decision-level fusion techniques, including a novel integration of Large Language Model (LLM) predictions. We also investigate the impact of replacing Multilayer Perceptron classifiers with Support Vector Machines. We extend our analysis to severity prediction using PHQ-8 and PCL-C scores and multi-class classification (considering co-occurring conditions). Our results demonstrate that utterance-based chunking significantly improves performance, particularly for text and audio modalities. Decision-level fusion, incorporating LLM predictions, achieves the highest accuracy, with a balanced accuracy of 94.8% for depression and 96.2% for PTSD detection. The combination of CNN-BiLSTM architectures with utterance-level chunking, coupled with the integration of external LLM, provides a powerful and nuanced approach to the detection and assessment of mental health conditions. Our findings highlight the potential of MMML for developing more accurate, accessible, and personalized mental healthcare tools.

Automated Multi-Label Annotation for Mental Health Illnesses Using Large Language Models

The growing prevalence and complexity of mental health disorders present significant challenges for accurate diagnosis and treatment, particularly in understanding the interplay between co-occurring conditions. Mental health disorders, such as depression and Anxiety, often co-occur, yet current datasets derived from social media posts typically focus on single-disorder labels, limiting their utility in comprehensive diagnostic analyses. This paper addresses this critical gap by proposing a novel methodology for cleaning, sampling, labeling, and combining data to create versatile multi-label datasets. Our approach introduces a synthetic labeling technique to transform single-label datasets into multi-label annotations, capturing the complexity of overlapping mental health conditions. To achieve this, two single-label datasets are first merged into a foundational multi-label dataset, enabling realistic analyses of co-occurring diagnoses. We then design and evaluate various prompting strategies for large language models (LLMs), ranging from single-label predictions to unrestricted prompts capable of detecting any present disorders. After rigorously assessing multiple LLMs and prompt configurations, the optimal combinations are identified and applied to label six additional single-disorder datasets from RMHD. The result is SPAADE-DR, a robust, multi-label dataset encompassing diverse mental health conditions. This research demonstrates the transformative potential of LLM-driven synthetic labeling in advancing mental health diagnostics from social media data, paving the way for more nuanced, data-driven insights into mental health care.