Text mining methods for the characterisation of suicidal thoughts and behaviour

Traditional research methods have shown low predictive value for suicidal risk assessments and limitations to be applied in clinical practice. The authors sought to evaluate natural language processing as a new tool for assessing self-injurious thoughts and behaviors and emotions related.We used MEmind project to assess 2838 psychiatric outpatients. Anonymous unstructured responses to the open-ended question how are you feeling today? were collected according to their emotional state. Natural language processing was used to process the patients' writings. The texts were automatically represented (corpus) and analyzed to determine their emotional content and degree of suicidal risk. Authors compared the patients' texts with a question used to assess lack of desire to live, as a suicidal risk assessment tool.Corpus consists of 5,489 short free-text documents containing 12,256 tokenized or unique words. The natural language processing showed an ROC-AUC score of 0.9638 when compared with the responses to lack of a desire to live question.Natural language processing shows encouraging results for classifying subjects according to their desire not to live as a measure of suicidal risk using patients' free texts. It is also easily applicable to clinical practice and facilitates real-time communication with patients, allowing better intervention strategies to be designed.

Automated summary

Traditional research methods have limited predictive value for suicidal risk assessments in clinical practice. In this study, natural language processing was used as a new tool to assess self-injurious thoughts and emotions. The authors evaluated 2838 psychiatric outpatients using the MEmind project and analyzed their anonymous unstructured responses to assess emotional content and suicidal risk. The results showed that natural language processing can effectively classify patients based on their desire not to live, facilitating real-time communication and intervention strategies.