DiGrI: Distorted Greedy Approach for Human-Assisted Online Suicide Ideation Detection

User-generated content on social media platforms provides a valuable resource for developing automated computational methods to detect mental health issues online leading to suicidal thoughts automatically. Although current fully automated methods show promise, they may produce uncertain predictions, leading to flawed conclusions. To address this, we propose a novel model called DiGrI, or Distorted Greedy Approach for Human-Assisted Online Suicide Ideation Detection, which reformulates suicide ideation assessment as a selective, prioritized prediction problem. The model incorporates a novel multi-classifier distorted greedy model that is optimized to operate under various levels of automation and abstains from making uncertain predictions with theoretical guarantees. Our results show that DiGrI outperforms strong comparative models including large language models in detecting mental health issues on a publicly available Reddit dataset. We discuss the empirical and practical implications, including the ethical considerations of using DiGrI for online automatic suicide ideation detection involving humans, if it were to be translated for use in clinical and public health practice.