Large language model powered knowledge graph construction for mental health exploration

Nat Commun. 2025 Aug 13;16(1):7526. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-62781-z.

Abstract

Mental health is a major global concern, yet findings remain fragmented across studies and databases, hindering integrative understanding and clinical translation. To address this gap, we present the Mental Disorders Knowledge Graph (MDKG)-a large-scale, contextualized knowledge graph built using large language models to unify evidence from biomedical literature and curated databases. MDKG comprises over 10 million relations, including nearly 1 million novel associations absent from existing resources. By structurally encoding contextual features such as conditionality, demographic factors, and co-occurring clinical attributes, the graph enables more nuanced interpretation and rapid expert validation, reducing evaluation time by up to 70%. Applied to predictive modeling in the UK Biobank, MDKG-enhanced representations yielded significant gains in predictive performance across multiple mental disorders. As a scalable and semantically enriched resource, MDKG offers a powerful foundation for accelerating psychiatric research and enabling interpretable, data-driven clinical insights.

MeSH terms

  • Databases, Factual
  • Humans
  • Language*
  • Large Language Models
  • Mental Disorders* / diagnosis
  • Mental Health*