With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), the NLP community is increasingly aware of the environmental consequences of model development due to the energy consumed for training and running these models. This study investigates the energy consumption and environmental impact of systems participating in the MentalRiskES shared task, at the Iberian Language Evaluation Forum (IberLEF) in the year 2023, which focuses on early risk identification of mental disorders in Spanish comments. Participants were asked to submit, for each prediction, a set of efficiency metrics, being carbon dioxide emissions among them. We conduct an empirical analysis of the data submitted considering model architecture, task complexity, and dataset characteristics, covering a spectrum from traditional Machine Learning (ML) models to advanced LLMs. Our findings contribute to understanding the ecological footprint of NLP systems and advocate for prioritizing environmental impact assessment in shared tasks to foster sustainability across diverse model types and approaches, being evaluation campaigns an adequate framework for this kind of analysis.

With mental health issues on the rise on the Web, especially among young people, there is a growing need for effective identification and intervention. In this paper, we introduce a new open-sourced corpus for the early detection of mental disorders in Spanish, focusing on eating disorders, depression, and anxiety. It consists of user messages posted on groups within the Telegram message platform and contains over 1,300 subjects with more than 45,000 messages posted in different public Telegram groups. This corpus has been manually annotated via crowdsourcing and is prepared for its use in several Natural Language Processing tasks including text classification and regression tasks. The samples in the corpus include both text and time data. To provide a benchmark for future research, we conduct experiments on text classification and regression by using state-of-the-art transformer-based models.