With the rise of mental health challenges, social media has become a key platform for emotional expression. Deep learning offers a promising solution for analyzing mental health but lacks flexibility and interpretability. Large language models (LLMs) introduce greater adaptability and can explain their decisions, yet they still underperform deep learning in complex psychological analysis. We present C-IMHI, the first multi-task Chinese social media interpretable mental health instruction dataset (9K samples) with quality control and manual validation. Additionally, we introduce MentalGLM, the first open-source Chinese LLMs for explainable mental health analysis, trained on 50K instructions. The proposed models excelled in three mental health downstream tasks, outperforming or matching deep learning and LLMs. A portion of the generated decision explanations was validated by experts, demonstrating promising accuracy and reliability. We evaluated the proposed models on a clinical dataset, where they significantly outperformed other LLMs, demonstrating their potential for clinical applications. Our models show strong performance, validated across tasks and domains. The decision explanations enhance usability and facilitate better understanding and practical application of the models. Both the constructed dataset and the models are publicly available via: https://github.com/zwzzzQAQ/MentalGLM.

Cognitive distortion is a critical issue in psychology, with most existing studies based on Burns’ cognitive distortion theory. However, differences in annotation standards lead to variations in building analysis tools, resulting in inconsistent analyses and limiting the generalizability of findings, especially in large-scale and cross-linguistic contexts. To address this issue, we collected all publicly available datasets (four in total) and conducted a series of experiments to evaluate the generalizability of various cross-linguistic models. The results indicate that models exhibit significant performance differences across datasets, highlighting the generalization problem. To mitigate this issue, we propose two solutions. First, we propose a multi-task learning model based on teacher student architecture solution, which demonstrates improved generalization performance in our experiments. Second, we introduce a new dataset (~5,000 samples) derived from reannotating existing open datasets to ensure standardized alignment. The annotation process we provided is interpretable and grounded in psychological principles. Based on this, we constructed large language models with cognitive reasoning chains, enhancing both generalizability and interpretability. This study identifies the generalization challenge in cognitive distortion research, and our experiments show that the proposed solutions significantly improve model performance. The dataset and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/HongzhiQ/CrossLinCD.

In the current environment, psychological issues are prevalent and widespread, with social media serving as a key outlet for individuals to share their feelings. This results in the generation of vast quantities of data daily, where negative emotions have the potential to precipitate crisis situations. There is a recognized need for models capable of efficient analysis. While pre-trained language models have demonstrated their effectiveness broadly, there’s a noticeable gap in pre-trained models tailored for specialized domains like psychology. To address this, we have collected a huge dataset from Chinese social media platforms and enriched it with publicly available datasets to create a comprehensive database encompassing 3.36 million text entries. To enhance the model’s applicability to psychological text analysis, we integrated psychological lexicons into the pre-training masking mechanism. Building on an existing Chinese language model, we performed adaptive training to develop a model specialized for the psychological domain. We evaluated our model’s performance across six public datasets, where it demonstrated improvements compared to eight other models. Additionally, in the qualitative comparison experiment, our model provided psychologically relevant predictions given the masked sentences. Due to concerns regarding data privacy, the dataset will not be made publicly available. However, we have made the pre-trained models and codes publicly accessible to the community via: https://github.com/zwzzzQAQ/Chinese-MentalBERT.