Skip to main content

Analysis of Social Media Posts for Early Detection of Mental Health Conditions

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10832))

Abstract

This paper presents a multipronged approach to predict early risk of mental health issues from user-generated content in social media. Supervised learning and information retrieval methods are used to estimate the risk of depression for a user given the content of its posts in reddit. The approach presented here was evaluated on the CLEF eRisk 2017 pilot task. We describe the details of five systems submitted to the task, and compare their performance. The comparisons show that combining information retrieval and machine learning methods gives the best results.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.reddit.com/.

  2. 2.

    http://clpsych.org/shared-task-2017/.

  3. 3.

    http://early.irlab.org/.

  4. 4.

    https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/.

  5. 5.

    https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/03/building-a-safer-community-with-new-suicide-prevention-tools/.

  6. 6.

    http://www.livejournal.com.

  7. 7.

    Obtained from a conceptual feature map in SenticNet [5].

  8. 8.

    Obtained from Wikipedia pages for “depression”, “psychoactive drugs”, and “list of antidepressants”.

  9. 9.

    http://lucene.apache.org/solr/.

  10. 10.

    http://clpsych.org/.

References

  1. Almeida, H., Queudot, M., Meurs, M.J.: Automatic triage of mental health online forum posts: CLPsych 2016 system description. In: Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, pp. 183–187 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Ayers, J.W., Althouse, B.M., Allem, J.P., Rosenquist, J.N., Ford, D.E.: Seasonality in seeking mental health information on Google. Am. J. Prev. Med. (AJPM) 44(5), 520–525 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Breiman, L.: Random forests. Mach. Learn. 45(1), 5–32 (2001)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  4. Brunborg, G.S., Mentzoni, R.A., Frøyland, L.R.: Is video gaming, or video game addiction, associated with depression, academic achievement, heavy episodic drinking, or conduct problems? J. Behav. Addict. 3(1), 27–32 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Cambria, E., Olsher, D., Rajagopal, D.: SenticNet 3: a common and common-sense knowledge base for cognition-driven sentiment analysis. In: Proceedings of the 28th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1515–1521. AAAI Press (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Coppersmith, G., Dredze, M., Harman, C., Hollingshead, K., Mitchell, M.: CLPsych 2015 shared task: depression and PTSD on Twitter. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych): From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality, pp. 31–39 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Coppersmith, G., Ngo, K., Leary, R., Wood, A.: Exploratory analysis of social media prior to a suicide attempt. In: Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Lingusitics and Clinical Psychology (CLPSych), pp. 106–117 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  8. De Choudhury, M., Gamon, M., Counts, S., Horvitz, E.: Predicting depression via social media. In: Proceedings of the 7th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), p. 2 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Granic, I., Lobel, A., Engels, R.C.: The benefits of playing video games. Am. Psychol. 69(1), 66 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Hammond, K.W., Laundry, R.J., OLeary, T.M., Jones, W.P.: Use of text search to effectively identify lifetime prevalence of suicide attempts among veterans. In: Proceedings of the 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), pp. 2676–2683. IEEE (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Hollingshead, K., Ireland, M.E., Loveys, K.: Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology—From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Hutto, C.J., Gilbert, E.: VADER: a parsimonious rule-based model for sentiment analysis of social media text. In: Proceedings of the 8th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), June 2014

    Google Scholar 

  13. Jones, K.S., Walker, S., Robertson, S.E.: A probabilistic model of information retrieval: development and comparative experiments: Part 2. Inf. Process. Manag. 36(6), 809–840 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H., Moon, S.: What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? In: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), pp. 591–600. ACM (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Landwehr, N., Hall, M., Frank, E.: Logistic model trees. Mach. Learn. 59(1–2), 161–205 (2005)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  16. Lin, H., Jia, J., Guo, Q., Xue, Y., Li, Q., Huang, J., Cai, L., Feng, L.: User-level psychological stress detection from social media using deep neural network. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia, pp. 507–516. ACM (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Losada, D.E., Crestani, F.: A test collection for research on depression and language use. In: Fuhr, N., Quaresma, P., Gonçalves, T., Larsen, B., Balog, K., Macdonald, C., Cappellato, L., Ferro, N. (eds.) CLEF 2016. LNCS, vol. 9822, pp. 28–39. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44564-9_3

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  18. Losada, D.E., Crestani, F., Parapar, J.: eRISK 2017: CLEF lab on early risk prediction on the internet: experimental foundations. In: Jones, G.J.F., Lawless, S., Gonzalo, J., Kelly, L., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T., Cappellato, L., Ferro, N. (eds.) CLEF 2017. LNCS, vol. 10456, pp. 346–360. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65813-1_30

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  19. McClellan, C., Ali, M.M., Mutter, R., Kroutil, L., Landwehr, J.: Using social media to monitor mental health discussions - evidence from Twitter. J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. (JAMIA) (2016). https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocw133

  20. Milne, D.N., Pink, G., Hachey, B., Calvo, R.A.: CLPsych 2016 shared task: triaging content in online peer-support forums. In: CLPsych@ HLT-NAACL, pp. 118–127 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Moreno, M.A., Ton, A., Selkie, E., Evans, Y.: Secret society 123: understanding the language of self-harm on Instagram. J. Adolesc. Health 58(1), 78–84 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Nguyen, T., Phung, D., Dao, B., Venkatesh, S., Berk, M.: Affective and content analysis of online depression communities. IEEE Trans. Affect. Comput. 5(3), 217–226 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Platt, J.: Sequential minimal optimization: a fast algorithm for training support vector machines. Technical report MSR-TR-98-14, Microsoft, April 1998

    Google Scholar 

  24. Ramrakha, S., Paul, C., Bell, M.L., Dickson, N., Moffitt, T.E., Caspi, A.: The relationship between multiple sex partners and anxiety, depression, and substance dependence disorders: a cohort study. Arch. Sex. Behav. 42(5), 863–872 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Rice, S.M., Goodall, J., Hetrick, S.E., Parker, A.G., Gilbertson, T., Amminger, G.P., Davey, C.G., McGorry, P.D., Gleeson, J., Alvarez-Jimenez, M.: Online and social networking interventions for the treatment of depression in young people: a systematic review. J. Med. Internet Res. (JMIR) 16(9), e206 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Santorini, B.: Part-of-speech tagging guidelines for the Penn Treebank project, 3rd revision. Technical reports (CIS), p. 570 (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Schou Andreassen, C., Billieux, J., Griffiths, M.D., Kuss, D.J., Demetrovics, Z., Mazzoni, E., Pallesen, S.: The relationship between addictive use of social media and video games and symptoms of psychiatric disorders: a large-scale cross-sectional study. Psychol. Addict. Behav. 30(2), 252 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marie-Jean Meurs .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Briand, A., Almeida, H., Meurs, MJ. (2018). Analysis of Social Media Posts for Early Detection of Mental Health Conditions. In: Bagheri, E., Cheung, J. (eds) Advances in Artificial Intelligence. Canadian AI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10832. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89656-4_11

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89656-4_11

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-89655-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-89656-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics