Semi-Supervised Approach to Monitoring Clinical Depressive Symptoms in Social Media
This work addresses the need for unobtrusive mental health monitoring for social media users, though it appears incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting clinical depressive symptoms from social media tweets, achieving an accuracy of 68% and precision of 72% using a semi-supervised statistical model that aligns with the PHQ-9 questionnaire.
With the rise of social media, millions of people are routinely expressing their moods, feelings, and daily struggles with mental health issues on social media platforms like Twitter. Unlike traditional observational cohort studies conducted through questionnaires and self-reported surveys, we explore the reliable detection of clinical depression from tweets obtained unobtrusively. Based on the analysis of tweets crawled from users with self-reported depressive symptoms in their Twitter profiles, we demonstrate the potential for detecting clinical depression symptoms which emulate the PHQ-9 questionnaire clinicians use today. Our study uses a semi-supervised statistical model to evaluate how the duration of these symptoms and their expression on Twitter (in terms of word usage patterns and topical preferences) align with the medical findings reported via the PHQ-9. Our proactive and automatic screening tool is able to identify clinical depressive symptoms with an accuracy of 68% and precision of 72%.