Machine Learning Methods in Student Mental Health Research: An Ethics-Centered Systematic Literature Review

This study conducts an ethics-centered analysis of the AI/ML models used in Student Mental Health (SMH) research, considering the ethical principles of fairness, privacy, transparency, and interpretability. First, this paper surveys the AI/ML methods used in the extant SMH literature published between 2015 and 2024, as well as the main health outcomes, to inform future work in the SMH field. Then, it leverages advanced topic modeling techniques to depict the prevailing themes in the corpus. Finally, this study proposes novel measurable privacy, transparency (reporting and replicability), interpretability, and fairness metrics scores as a multi-dimensional integrative framework to evaluate the extent of ethics awareness and consideration in AI/ML-enabled SMH research. Findings show that (i) 65% of the surveyed papers disregard the privacy principle; (ii) 59% of the studies use black-box models resulting in low interpretability scores; and (iii) barely 18% of the papers provide demographic information about participants, indicating a limited consideration of the fairness principle. Nonetheless, the transparency principle is implemented at a satisfactory level with mean reporting and replicability scores of 80%. Overall, our results suggest a significant lack of awareness and consideration for the ethical principles of privacy, fairness, and interpretability in AI/ML-enabled SMH research. As AI/ML continues to expand in SMH, incorporating ethical considerations at every stage—from design to dissemination—is essential for producing ethically responsible and reliable research.