Deep learning characterizes depression and suicidal ideation in young adults from eye movements

Objective biobehavioral markers for mental health conditions remain elusive, with diagnosis typically relying on self-reports and clinical interviews. We investigate eye tracking as a potential marker of attentional and mood biases associated with symptoms of depression and suicidal ideation from self-reported screening questionnaires. We analyze eye movements from 126 young adults during reading and responding to emotionally loaded sentences. A deep learning framework was designed to account for intra-trial and inter-trial variations in eye movements, achieving an AUC of 0.793 (95% CI: 0.766–0.819) for identifying depression/suicidality against healthy controls, and 0.826 (95% CI: 0.798–0.853) for suicidality specifically. The model also exhibited moderate accuracy in differentiating depressed from suicidal individuals (AUC: 0.609, 95% CI: 0.569–0.646). Discriminative patterns were more pronounced during response generation and for stimuli of negative sentiment. These findings suggest that eye tracking can provide objective markers of self-reported symptom severity by measuring the impact of emotional stimuli on oculomotor control.