Understanding mental health discourse on Reddit with transformers and explainability.

ABSTRACT: Social media is a powerful tool also for discussing mental health. The conversations that take place in these spaces provide a unique insight into how users talk about the issue. This study uses fine-tuned pretrained transformer models (BERT and MentalBERT), to classify Reddit posts about anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder (BPD) in specialised subreddits. By assessing how well subreddit conversations align with their intended mental health focus, the analysis ensures that these communities are effectively serving their purpose as support spaces. Our classification models achieve an average accuracy of 82%, with MentalBERT slightly outperforming BERT. To ensure transparency, we use Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) to identify key

SUBMITTER: Sanchez Rodriguez I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12916813 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature