Enhancing Suicide Risk Assessment: A Speech-Based Automated Approach in Emergency Medicine

The delayed access to specialized psychiatric assessments and care for patients at risk of suicidal tendencies in emergency departments creates a notable gap in timely intervention, hindering the provision of adequate mental health support during critical situations. To address this, we present a non-invasive, speech-based approach for automatic suicide risk assessment. For our study, we have collected a novel dataset of speech recordings from 20 patients from which we extract three sets of features, including wav2vec, interpretable speech and acoustic features, and deep learning-based spectral representations. We proceed by conducting a binary classification to assess suicide risk in a leave-one-subject-out fashion. Our most effective speech model achieves a balanced accuracy of 66.2 %. Moreover, we show that integrating our speech model with a series of patients' metadata, such as the history of suicide attempts or access to firearms, improves the overall result. The metadata integration yields a balanced accuracy of 94.4 %, marking an absolute improvement of 28.2 %, demonstrating the efficacy of our proposed approaches for automatic suicide risk assessment in emergency medicine.