BEACON: Better Evaluation and Assessment for Comprehensive Mental Health Outcomes and Navigation

There is currently no tool that comprehensively evaluates and integrates the various factors contributing to suicide risk into a unified scoring system. Additionally, no existing solution provides caregivers with a centralized, comprehensive resource to access critical information when supporting veterans at risk of suicide. The proposed solution, BEACON aims to address these gaps by leveraging an LLM-powered co-pilot designed to empower caregivers and mental health specialists. BEACON will provide around-the-clock assistance, enhance understanding and assessments, and improve the effectiveness of interventions, ultimately supporting more timely and targeted care for veterans. BEACON uniquely addresses the limitations of current techniques, such as considering the reasons including social determinants, stable housing, financial security, access to healthcare,  possession of firearms, and social media posts, etc and linking it towards suicides via risk scoring unlike using constrained data from a specific institution. The proposed technology hypothesizes that it could remedy the above limitations by employing large language models, a remarkable advancement in natural language processing. Successful implementation of the proposed strategy (BEACON) is expected to provide a chatGPT like capability for mental health professionals, which leverages an LLM pretrained o comprehensive veterans mental health data.  It can also aid the mental health professionals as a comprehensive suicidal screening tool to enhance their ability to care for and interact with mental health patients at risk of suicide.