SAFENet: Towards a Robust Suicide Assessment in Social Media Using Selective Prediction Framework

The rising rate of mental health issues in the digital age underscores the critical need for proactive interventions to assess an individual’s well-being. This problem is further exacerbated by the social stigma surrounding the subject, which suppresses the willingness of victims to seek help. Social media can serve as an outlet for such individuals to express their negative emotions or thoughts of self-harm. The social media account of an individual can offer a plethora of valuable information that can be used to predict their mental health. By unifying principles of robust classifier training and selective classification, we propose a novel framework, SAFENet, to predict the suicide risk of users by using their historical social media posts. When the confidence of prediction is low or the individual is classified as a high-risk user, SAFENet delegates the analysis of the posts to a human evaluator for further intervention. Our experiments show that SAFENet outperforms existing state-of-the-art frameworks. We further qualitatively analyze predictions from SAFENet and demonstrate that it performs robustly on difficult samples that may cause contemporary methods to make errors. Our system addresses the urgent need for efficient and effective mental health intervention in the digital era.