SMHD: A Large-Scale Resource for Exploring Online Language Usage for Multiple Mental Health Conditions
This provides a resource for researchers studying mental health through online language, but it is incremental as it builds on existing work in dataset creation for mental health applications.
The authors tackled the lack of large-scale labeled datasets for mental health research by creating SMHD, a dataset of social media posts from users with self-reported diagnoses of nine mental health conditions and matched controls, enabling analysis of language distinctions and classification methods.
Mental health is a significant and growing public health concern. As language usage can be leveraged to obtain crucial insights into mental health conditions, there is a need for large-scale, labeled, mental health-related datasets of users who have been diagnosed with one or more of such conditions. In this paper, we investigate the creation of high-precision patterns to identify self-reported diagnoses of nine different mental health conditions, and obtain high-quality labeled data without the need for manual labelling. We introduce the SMHD (Self-reported Mental Health Diagnoses) dataset and make it available. SMHD is a novel large dataset of social media posts from users with one or multiple mental health conditions along with matched control users. We examine distinctions in users' language, as measured by linguistic and psychological variables. We further explore text classification methods to identify individuals with mental conditions through their language.