Two-Stage Voting for Robust and Efficient Suicide Risk Detection on Social Media

Abstract

Suicide rates have risen worldwide in recent years, underscoring the urgent need for proactive prevention strategies. Social media provides valuable signals, as many at-risk individuals - who often avoid formal help due to stigma - choose instead to share their distress online. Yet detecting implicit suicidal ideation, conveyed indirectly through metaphor, sarcasm, or subtle emotional cues, remains highly challenging. Lightweight models like BERT handle explicit signals but fail on subtle implicit ones, while large language models (LLMs) capture nuance at prohibitive computational cost. To address this gap, we propose a two-stage voting architecture that balances efficiency and robustness. In Stage 1, a lightweight BERT classifier rapidly resolves high-confidence explicit cases. In Stage 2, ambiguous inputs are escalated to either (i) a multi-perspective LLM voting framework to maximize recall on implicit ideation, or (ii) a feature-based ML ensemble guided by psychologically grounded indicators extracted via prompt-engineered LLMs for efficiency and interpretability. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first works to operationalize LLM-extracted psychological features as structured vectors for suicide risk detection. On two complementary datasets - explicit-dominant Reddit and implicit-only DeepSuiMind - our framework outperforms single-model baselines, achieving 98.0% F1 on explicit cases, 99.7% on implicit ones, and reducing the cross-domain gap below 2%, while significantly lowering LLM cost.