Explainable Predictive Model for Suicidal Ideation During COVID-19: Social Media Discourse Study

Background: Studying the impact of COVID-19 on mental health is both compelling and imperative for the health care system's preparedness development. Discovering how pandemic conditions and governmental strategies and measures have impacted mental health is a challenging task. Mental health issues, such as depression and suicidal tendency, are traditionally explored through psychological battery tests and clinical procedures. To address the stigma associated with mental illness, social media is used to examine language patterns in posts related to suicide. This strategy enhances the comprehension and interpretation of suicidal ideation. Despite easy expression via social media, suicidal thoughts remain sensitive and complex to comprehend and detect. Suicidal ideation captures the new suicidal statements used during the COVID-19 pandemic that represents a different context of expressions. Objective: In this study, our aim was to detect suicidal ideation by mining textual content extracted from social media by leveraging state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Methods: The work was divided into 2 major phases, one to classify suicidal ideation posts and the other to extract factors that cause suicidal ideation. We proposed a hybrid deep learning-based neural network approach (Bidirectional Encoder Representations fromTransformers [BERT]+convolutional neural network [CNN]+long short-term memory [LSTM]) to classify suicidal and nonsuicidal posts. Two state-of-the-art deep learning approaches (CNN and LSTM) were combined based on features (terms) selectedfromtermfrequency-inversedocumentfrequency (TF-IDF), Word2vec, and BERT. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) was used to extract key factors that contribute to suicidal ideation in order to provide a reliable and sustainable solution. Results: Of 348,110 records, 3154 (0.9%) were selected, resulting in 1338 (42.4%) suicidal and 1816 (57.6%) nonsuicidal instances. The CNN+LSTM+BERT model achieved superior performance, with a precision of 94%, a recall of 95%, an F1-score of 94%, and an accuracy of 93.65%. Conclusions: Considering the dynamic nature of suicidal behavior posts, we proposed a fused architecture that captures both localized and generalized contextual information that is important for understanding the language patterns and predict the evolution of suicidal ideation over time. According to Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) and Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) XAI algorithms, there was a drift in the features during and beforeCOVID-19. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, new features have been added, which leads to suicidal tendencies. In the future, strategies need to be developed to combat this deadly disease.