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Suicidal ideation detection is crucial for preventing suicides, a leading cause of death worldwide. Many individuals express suicidal thoughts on social media, offering a vital opportunity for early detection through advanced machine learning techniques. The identification of suicidal ideation in social media text is improved by utilising a hybrid framework that integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), enhanced with an attention mechanism. To enhance the interpretability of the model's predictions, Explainable AI (XAI) methods are applied, with a particular focus on SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), are incorporated. At first, the model managed to reach an accuracy of 92.81%. By applying fine-tuning and early stopping techniques, the accuracy improved to 94.29%. The SHAP analysis revealed key features influencing the model's predictions, such as terms related to mental health struggles. This level of transparency boosts the model's credibility while helping mental health professionals understand and trust the predictions. This work highlights the potential for improving the accuracy and interpretability of detecting suicidal tendencies, making a valuable contribution to the progress of mental health monitoring systems. It emphasizes the significance of blending powerful machine learning methods with explainability to develop reliable and impactful mental health solutions.

This review underscores the critical need for effective strategies to identify and support individuals with suicidal ideation, exploiting technological innovations in ML and DL to further suicide prevention efforts. The study details the application of these technologies in analyzing vast amounts of unstructured social media data to detect linguistic patterns, keywords, phrases, tones, and contextual cues associated with suicidal thoughts. It explores various ML and DL models like SVMs, CNNs, LSTM, neural networks, and their effectiveness in interpreting complex data patterns and emotional nuances within text data. The review discusses the potential of these technologies to serve as a life-saving tool by identifying at-risk individuals through their digital traces. Furthermore, it evaluates the real-world effectiveness, limitations, and ethical considerations of employing these technologies for suicide prevention, stressing the importance of responsible development and usage. The study aims to fill critical knowledge gaps by analyzing recent studies, methodologies, tools, and techniques in this field. It highlights the importance of synthesizing current literature to inform practical tools and suicide prevention efforts, guiding innovation in reliable, ethical systems for early intervention. This research synthesis evaluates the intersection of technology and mental health, advocating for the ethical and responsible application of ML, DL, and NLP to offer life-saving potential worldwide while addressing challenges like generalizability, biases, privacy, and the need for further research to ensure these technologies do not exacerbate existing inequities and harms.