FedMentalCare: Towards Privacy-Preserving Fine-Tuned LLMs to Analyze Mental Health Status Using Federated Learning Framework

Abstract: With the increasing prevalence of mental health conditions worldwide, AI-powered chatbots and conversational agents have emerged as accessible tools to support mental health. However, deploying LLMs in mental healthcare applications raises significant privacy concerns, especially regarding regulations like HIPAA and GDPR. In this work, we propose FedMentalCare, a privacy-preserving framework that leverages Federated Learning (FL) combined with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune LLMs for mental health analysis. We investigate the performance impact of varying client data volumes and model architectures (e.g., MobileBERT and MiniLM) in FL environments. Our framework demonstrates a scalable, privacy-aware approach for deploying LLMs in real-world mental healthcare scenarios, addressing data security and computational efficiency challenges.