On the State of Social Media Data for Mental Health Research
This work addresses data-related challenges for researchers in computational mental health, but it is incremental as it builds on prior reviews by providing a structured directory.
The paper tackles the problem of limited progress in mental health research due to inadequate data availability by analyzing the state of social media data and introducing an open-source directory of datasets with standardized annotations.
Data-driven methods for mental health treatment and surveillance have become a major focus in computational science research in the last decade. However, progress in the domain, in terms of both medical understanding and system performance, remains bounded by the availability of adequate data. Prior systematic reviews have not necessarily made it possible to measure the degree to which data-related challenges have affected research progress. In this paper, we offer an analysis specifically on the state of social media data that exists for conducting mental health research. We do so by introducing an open-source directory of mental health datasets, annotated using a standardized schema to facilitate meta-analysis.