M-HELP: Mental Health Help-Seeking Behavior Dataset

📖 Description

M-HELP is the first dataset focused on identifying help-seeking behavior on social media.
The dataset also includes multi-label mental health disorder annotations, enabling research not only in detecting whether a person is seeking help, but also in classifying possible underlying mental health concerns.

This dataset was introduced in our EMNLP Findings 2025 paper:
"M-HELP: Using Social Media Data to Detect Mental Health Help-Seeking Signals"

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🧩 Key Features

• Novel Dataset for Help-Seeking Behavior
  • Binary classification: posts labeled as Help-Seeking (1) or Not Help-Seeking (0).
• Multi-Label Mental Health Disorder Classification
  • Each post may be annotated with one or more disorders, covering:
    • MDD (Major Depressive Disorder)
    • OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder)
    • BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder)
    • GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder)
    • SZD (Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder)
    • ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder)
    • AND (Anorexia Nervosa Disorder)
    • SUD (Substance Use Disorder)
    • PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)

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📊 Dataset Statistics

Split	Avg Words	Max Words	Help (1)	No Help (0)	MDD	OCD	BPD	GAD	SZD	ASD	AND	SUD	PTSD
Train	265	3380	648	494	676	117	446	601	120	78	25	206	285
Val	297	2337	191	161	225	40	149	196	40	28	7	67	97
Test	274	2795	210	149	225	42	149	204	40	29	12	71	106
Total	-	-	1049	804	1126	199	744	1001	200	135	44	344	488

Table: Statistics of the proposed dataset M-HELP. Label 1 represents the class Require Help in the Help-Seeking category.

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📥 Access

• Preprint: arXiv:2508.15440

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⚖️ Ethical Considerations

• The dataset is collected in compliance with IRB protocols and Reddit’s public content policy.
• All posts are anonymized with no personally identifying information.
• This resource is intended to support voluntary outreach by mental health professionals and academic research, not for automated surveillance or monitoring.

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📝 Citation

If you find this dataset useful in your research, please cite:

@misc{sathvik2025mhelpusingsocialmedia,
      title={M-HELP: Using Social Media Data to Detect Mental Health Help-Seeking Signals}, 
      author={MSVPJ Sathvik and Zuhair Hasan Shaik and Vivek Gupta},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2508.15440},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15440}, 
}