MentalGLM Series: Explainable Large Language Models for Mental Health Analysis on Chinese Social Media

With the rise of mental health challenges, social media has become a key platform for emotional expression. Deep learning offers a promising solution for analyzing mental health but lacks flexibility and interpretability. Large language models (LLMs) introduce greater adaptability and can explain their decisions, yet they still underperform deep learning in complex psychological analysis. We present C-IMHI, the first multi-task Chinese social media interpretable mental health instruction dataset (9K samples) with quality control and manual validation. Additionally, we introduce MentalGLM, the first open-source Chinese LLMs for explainable mental health analysis, trained on 50K instructions. The proposed models excelled in three mental health downstream tasks, outperforming or matching deep learning and LLMs. A portion of the generated decision explanations was validated by experts, demonstrating promising accuracy and reliability. We evaluated the proposed models on a clinical dataset, where they significantly outperformed other LLMs, demonstrating their potential for clinical applications. Our models show strong performance, validated across tasks and domains. The decision explanations enhance usability and facilitate better understanding and practical application of the models. Both the constructed dataset and the models are publicly available via: https: //github.com/zwzzzQAQ/MentalGLM .