Mental Health Disorder Detection beyond Social Media: A Systematic Review of Available Datasets

Sadiya Sayara Chowdhury Puspo, Ana-Maria Bucur, Stevie Chancellor, Özlem Uzuner, Marcos Zampieri


Abstract
Detecting mental health disorders in a timely manner is an important societal challenge. NLP and machine learning (ML) methods used to assist with detection rely on data collected primarily from social media. However, such datasets often have sampling biases and inherent ethical and privacy issues. One avenue to overcome these limitations is non-social media data. We present the first comprehensive review of non-social media, free-text datasets for mental health research. We use the PRISMA methodology to conduct our survey and we review datasets available in multiple languages. We find that non-social media free-text based datasets are predominantly focused on English and on detecting depression. These datasets also vary in demographics, platforms, data types, annotation techniques, and methodologies. This systematic review also reveals key gaps and highlights opportunities to develop more diverse, reliable and clinically-relevant resources.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.494
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
6235–6250
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.494/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sadiya Sayara Chowdhury Puspo, Ana-Maria Bucur, Stevie Chancellor, Özlem Uzuner, and Marcos Zampieri. 2026. Mental Health Disorder Detection beyond Social Media: A Systematic Review of Available Datasets. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:6235–6250.
Cite (Informal):
Mental Health Disorder Detection beyond Social Media: A Systematic Review of Available Datasets (Puspo et al., LREC 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.494.pdf