Revolutionizing Mental Health Sentiment Analysis With BERT-Fuse: A Hybrid Deep Learning Model

Mental health disorders profoundly affect intellectual ability, emotional resilience, and social stability, leading to lasting effects on both individuals and society. Increasing global concern over mental health calls for innovative solutions, with sentiment analysis emerging as a promising approach for early diagnosis and intervention. Traditional methods are limited by the complexity of mental health-related texts, which contain specialized terminology and domain-specific nuances. To address these challenges, we propose BERT-Fuse, a hybrid deep learning model combining traditional feature extraction techniques (TF-IDF and Bag-of-Words) with advanced neural architectures, including Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Transformer blocks, and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). We evaluated three word embedding techniques-BERT, GloVe, and FastText within BERT-Fuse and found that BERT embeddings achieve the highest performance in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The model was trained on a balanced dataset of text samples representing seven mental health conditions. An ablation study highlights the contributions of key model components to its performance. BERT-Fuse shows promise as a scalable, high-precision system for mental health detection with an impressive average test accuracy of 97.05%. Our model bridges the gap between deep learning and psychological text analysis, paving the way for future mental health assessment tools that are more intelligent and easily accessible.