# Suicidal Ideation Detection: A Review of Machine Learning Methods and Applications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.12611 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12611/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [MentalBERT: Publicly Available Pretrained Language Models for Mental Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15621/) (2021)
- [Anticipating Safety Issues in E2E Conversational AI: Framework and Tooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03451/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for Suicide and Depression Identification with Unsupervised Label Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09427/) (2021)
- [Psy-LLM: Scaling up Global Mental Health Psychological Services with AI-based Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11991/) (2023)
- [Domain-specific Continued Pretraining of Language Models for Capturing Long Context in Mental Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10447/) (2023)
- [Probing the Moral Development of Large Language Models through Defining Issues Test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13356/) (2023)
- [Characterization of Time-variant and Time-invariant Assessment of Suicidality on Reddit using C-SSRS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04140/) (2021)
- [Can Large Language Models Identify Implicit Suicidal Ideation? An Empirical Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17899/) (2025)
- [Still Not Quite There! Evaluating Large Language Models for Comorbid Mental Health Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03908/) (2024)
- [Learning Models for Suicide Prediction from Social Media Posts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03315/) (2021)
- [Artificial Intelligence for Suicide Assessment using Audiovisual Cues: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09130/) (2022)
- [ScAN: Suicide Attempt and Ideation Events Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07872/) (2022)
- [Detecting potentially harmful and protective suicide-related content on twitter: A machine learning approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04796/) (2021)
- [Detecting Suicide Risk in Online Counseling Services: A Study in a Low-Resource Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04830/) (2022)
- [Data Quality Matters: Suicide Intention Detection on Social Media Posts Using RoBERTa-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02262/) (2024)
- [The First Multilingual Model For The Detection of Suicide Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15498/) (2024)
- [A Picture May Be Worth a Thousand Lives: An Interpretable Artificial Intelligence Strategy for Predictions of Suicide Risk from Social Media Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09488/) (2023)
- [Suicide Risk Assessment on Social Media with Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12767/) (2024)
- [Lexicography Saves Lives (LSL): Automatically Translating Suicide-Related Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15497/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Reasoning LLMs for Suicide Screening with the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13480/) (2025)
- [PETLP: A Privacy-by-Design Pipeline for Social Media Data in AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09232/) (2025)
- [Suicidal Comment Tree Dataset: Enhancing Risk Assessment and Prediction Through Contextual Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14395/) (2025)
- [Social Behavior and Mental Health: A Snapshot Survey under COVID-19 Pandemic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08165/) (2021)
- [Time-to-event modeling of subreddits transitions to r/SuicideWatch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06030/) (2023)
- [CautionSuicide: A Deep Learning Based Approach for Detecting Suicidal Ideation in Real Time Chatbot Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01023/) (2024)
- [Cyber Risks of Machine Translation Critical Errors : Arabic Mental Health Tweets as a Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11668/) (2024)
- [Detection of Suicidal Risk on Social Media: A Hybrid Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23797/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Fusion Multimodal Network for SpeechWellness Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18057/) (2025)
- [Handling Extreme Class Imbalance: Using GANs in Data Augmentation for Suicide Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17661/) (2025)
- [FigSIM: A Dataset for Fine-grained Suicide Severity and Figurative Language in Suicide Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02523/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Suicide is a critical issue in modern society. Early detection and prevention of suicide attempts should be addressed to save people's life. Current suicidal ideation detection methods include clinical methods based on the interaction between social workers or experts and the targeted individuals and machine learning techniques with feature engineering or deep learning for automatic detection based on online social contents. This paper is the first survey that comprehensively introduces and discusses the methods from these categories. Domain-specific applications of suicidal ideation detection are reviewed according to their data sources, i.e., questionnaires, electronic health records, suicide notes, and online user content. Several specific tasks and datasets are introduced and summarized to facilitate further research. Finally, we summarize the limitations of current work and provide an outlook of further research directions.