# Depression Risk Assessment in Social Media via Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19887 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19887/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Publicly Available Clinical BERT Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03323/) (2019)
- [BERTweet: A pre-trained language model for English Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10200/) (2020)
- [DepressionEmo: A novel dataset for multilabel classification of depression emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04655/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Depression is one of the most prevalent and debilitating mental health conditions worldwide, frequently underdiagnosed and undertreated. The proliferation of social media platforms provides a rich source of naturalistic linguistic signals for the automated monitoring of psychological well-being. In this work, we propose a system based on Large Language Models (LLMs) for depression risk assessment in Reddit posts, through multi-label classification of eight depression-associated emotions and the computation of a weighted severity index. The method is evaluated in a zero-shot setting on the annotated DepressionEmo dataset (~6,000 posts) and applied in-the-wild to 469,692 comments collected from four subreddits over the period 2024-2025. Our best model, gemma3:27b, achieves micro-F1 = 0.75 and macro-F1 = 0.70, results competitive with purpose-built fine-tuned models (BART: micro-F1 = 0.80, macro-F1 = 0.76). The in-the-wild analysis reveals consistent and temporally stable risk profiles across communities, with marked differences between r/depression and r/anxiety. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of a cost-effective, scalable approach for large-scale psychological monitoring.