An AI-based intelligent diagnosis system for adolescent mental health based on multitask deep learning

Background and objectives: Adolescent depression and anxiety are becoming increasingly prevalent in China, with rates reaching 20%-30%, driven largely by intense academic pressure and the cultural tendency toward somatization. Traditional screening tools, such as the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), often suffer from subjective bias, recall errors, and underreporting due to social stigma. This study developed an AI-based intelligent diagnosis system (IDS) using multitask deep learning to non-intrusively predict comorbid depression and anxiety severity based on the spontaneous textual expressions of Chinese adolescents. Methods: Textual responses from approximately 1,275 adolescents were collected and labeled with clinician-assessed PHQ-9 and GAD-7 scores. Preprocessing involved jieba segmentation and variational autoencoder (VAE)-based data augmentation to address class imbalance, resulting in an expanded test set of 308 samples. The IDS architecture utilizes a Chinese-optimized BERT encoder with self-attention and dual-feature fusion (combining pooled [CLS] tokens and global pooling) to extract shared representations. These are processed through multitask heads for regression (MSE loss) and classification (weighted cross-entropy). The model was trained using an 8:1:1 split with AdamW optimization, cosine annealing, and regularization, supported by ablation studies to validate individual components. Results: On the test set, the IDS achieved Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.706 for PHQ-9 and 0.693 for GAD-7, with AUC values of 0.877 and 0.902, respectively. Binary classification yielded F1-scores of 0.762 (PHQ-9) and 0.863 (GAD-7). Ablation analysis confirmed that the multitask learning framework improved F1-scores by 6.2%-7.8% and reduced MSE by 14.2%-18.4%. Furthermore, adaptations for somatization and data augmentation for severe cases significantly enhanced the system's sensitivity. Conclusion: The IDS offers a robust, culturally sensitive, and scalable tool for adolescent mental health screening. By outperforming single-task baselines, it provides a proactive, privacy-preserving alternative to traditional self-reports. Future research will focus on longitudinal validation, multimodal integration, and ethical deployment strategies to maximize the system's utility in educational and clinical settings.