Leveraging Audio and Text Modalities in Mental Health: A Study of LLMs Performance

Mental health disorders are increasingly prevalent worldwide, creating an urgent need for innovative tools to support early diagnosis and intervention. This study explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in multimodal mental health diagnostics, specifically for detecting depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder through text and audio modalities. Using the E-DAIC dataset, we compare text and audio modalities to investigate whether LLMs can perform equally well or better with audio inputs. We further examine the integration of both modalities to determine if this can enhance diagnostic accuracy, which generally results in improved performance metrics. Our analysis specifically utilizes custom-formulated metrics; Modal Superiority Score and Disagreement Resolvement Score to evaluate how combined modalities influence model performance. The Gemini 1.5 Pro model achieves the highest scores in binary depression classification when using the combined modality, with an F1 score of 0.67 and a Balanced Accuracy (BA) of 77.4%, assessed across the full dataset. These results represent an increase of 3.1% over its performance with the text modality and 2.7% over the audio modality, highlighting the effectiveness of integrating modalities to enhance diagnostic accuracy. Notably, all results are obtained in zero-shot inferring, highlighting the robustness of the models without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. To explore the impact of different configurations on model performance, we conduct binary, severity, and multiclass tasks using both zero-shot and few-shot prompts, examining the effects of prompt variations on performance. The results reveal that models such as Gemini 1.5 Pro in text and audio modalities, and GPT-4o mini in the text modality, often surpass other models in balanced accuracy and F1 scores across multiple tasks.