Commentary on: Wiest IC, Verhees FG, Ferber D, Zhu J, Bauer M, Lewitzka U, Pfennig A, Mikolas P, Kather JN. Detection of suicidality from medical text using privacy-preserving large language models. Br J Psychiatry. 2024 Dec;225(6):532-537. doi: 10.1192/bjp.2024.134.
Implications for practice and research Using large language models (LLMs) can enhance early detection of suicidality in psychiatric care, improving patient outcomes through timely intervention. Future research should focus on fine-tuning LLMs for broader languages and diagnoses to generalise their application and increase clinical utility.
Suicide is a major global health challenge, accounting for a significant proportion of psychiatric emergencies. Early detection and intervention are crucial to reducing mortality, yet the unstructured nature of clinical data, particularly psychiatric admission notes, poses challenges for scalable analysis. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), specifically large language models (LLMs), present opportunities to analyse such data. By capturing nuances...