Can Artificial Intelligence Support Healthcare and Mental Health Through Early Cyberbullying Detection ? The Impact of Emotion-Aware AI on Proactive Online Safety

Healthcare systems, mental health, and public well-being are increasingly affected by cyberbullying and harmful online interactions. This paper presents CareGuard, an early-warning framework designed to support healthcare-driven mental health protection and proactive online safety through the detection of cyberbullying-related content using advanced natural language processing techniques. CareGuard integrates zero-shot semantic labeling with fine-tuned transformer-based models, including BERT, DistilBERT, and RoBERTa, to enable robust and context-aware classification across sensitive cyberbullying categories. To improve efficiency and reduce unnecessary computation in healthcare-oriented monitoring settings, the framework incorporates an emotion-aware filtering mechanism alongside cosine similarity-based semantic screening, allowing the system to focus on semantically relevant and emotionally salient content. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CareGuard effectively balances detection accuracy and computational efficiency, highlighting its potential for scalable deployment in healthcare systems, mental health monitoring, and online safety applications.