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Suicide- and crisis-risk detection using large language models in mental-health chatbots

2026-01-15 psychiatry and clinical psychology Title + abstract only
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ObjectiveLarge language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in mental-health chatbots, yet safe deployment is limited by two unresolved challenges: (1) suicide- and crisis-risk detection lacks a definitive ground truth and is characterized by substantial clinician disagreement, and (2) most evaluations frame risk detection as an offline accuracy task rather than a real-time safety problem. This study aimed to empirically characterize these limitations and to derive design principles for unce...

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