# A Machine Learning Approach for Detection of Mental Health Conditions and Cyberbullying from Social Media

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20001 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20001/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13663/) (2024)
- [HateXplain: A Benchmark Dataset for Explainable Hate Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10289/) (2020)
- [A Closer Look at AUROC and AUPRC under Class Imbalance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06091/) (2024)
- [Robust Hate Speech Detection in Social Media: A Cross-Dataset Empirical Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01680/) (2023)
- [Depression Detection on Social Media with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10750/) (2024)
- [Detecting anxiety and depression in dialogues: a multi-label and explainable approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17651/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mental health challenges and cyberbullying are increasingly prevalent in digital spaces, necessitating scalable and interpretable detection systems. This paper introduces a unified multiclass classification framework for detecting ten distinct mental health and cyberbullying categories from social media data. We curate datasets from Twitter and Reddit, implementing a rigorous "split-then-balance" pipeline to train on balanced data while evaluating on a realistic, held-out imbalanced test set. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation comparing traditional lexical models, hybrid approaches, and several end-to-end fine-tuned transformers. Our results demonstrate that end-to-end fine-tuning is critical for performance, with the domain-adapted MentalBERT emerging as the top model, achieving an accuracy of 0.92 and a Macro F1 score of 0.76, surpassing both its generic counterpart and a zero-shot LLM baseline. Grounded in a comprehensive ethical analysis, we frame the system as a human-in-the-loop screening aid, not a diagnostic tool. To support this, we introduce a hybrid SHAPLLM explainability framework and present a prototype dashboard ("Social Media Screener") designed to integrate model predictions and their explanations into a practical workflow for moderators. Our work provides a robust baseline, highlighting future needs for multi-label, clinically-validated datasets at the critical intersection of online safety and computational mental health.