Just in time crisis response: suicide alert system for telemedicine psychotherapy settings. (3rd April 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bantilan, Niels; Malgaroli, Matteo; Ray, Bonnie; Hull, Thomas D.
• Is Part Of: Psychotherapy research. Volume 31:Number 3(2021)
• Page Start: 289
• Page End: 299
• Publication Date: 2021-04-03
• Subjects: suicide -- natural language processing -- machine learning -- telemedicine -- digital health; Psychotherapy -- Periodicals; Psychotherapy -- Research -- Periodicals; Psychotherapy -- Periodicals; Psychothérapie -- Périodiques; Psychothérapie -- Recherche -- Périodiques; 616.891405
• DOI: 10.1080/10503307.2020.1781952
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1050-3307

Abstract

Abstract : Objective: To design a Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithm capable of detecting suicide content from patients' written communication to their therapists, to support rapid response and clinical decision making in telehealth settings. Method: A training dataset of therapy transcripts for 1, 864 patients was established by detecting patient content endorsing suicidality using a proxy-model anchored on therapists' suicide prevention interventions; human expert raters then assessed the level of suicide risk endorsed by patients identified by the proxy-model (i.e., no risk, risk factors, ideation, method, or plan). A bag-of-words classification model was then iteratively built using the annotations from the expert raters to detect suicide risk level in 85, 216 labeled patients' sentences from the training dataset. Results: The final NLP model identified risk-related content from non-risk content with good accuracy (AUC = 82.78). Conclusions: Risk for suicide could be reliably identified by the NLP algorithm. The risk detection model could assist telehealth clinicians in providing crisis resources in a timely manner. This modeling approach could also be applied to other psychotherapy research tasks to assist in the understanding of how the psychotherapy process unfolds for each patient and therapist.