Reading Anxiety or Reading the Label? Comparing Fine-Tuned and Frontier Models for Anxiety Detection on Social Media

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.20847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Anxiety is among the most common mental health conditions, and people often write about it online well before seeking clinical help. Practitioners building detection tools face a concrete choice: call a frontier commercial model, fine-tune a smaller model in-house, or deploy a conventional classifier. We compare six conditions spanning all three on a held-out Reddit test set under a single controlled protocol. We also identify a confound in how thi