Life is not Always Depressing: Exploring the Happy Moments of People Diagnosed with Depression
This provides insights into the emotional experiences of people with depression, potentially informing mental health support, but is incremental in exploring a specific aspect of depression.
The study tackled the problem of understanding happiness in individuals diagnosed with depression by analyzing social media posts, showing that depressed individuals report positive events related to friends and family as more noteworthy compared to mundane happy events in controls.
In this work, we explore the relationship between depression and manifestations of happiness in social media. While the majority of works surrounding depression focus on symptoms, psychological research shows that there is a strong link between seeking happiness and being diagnosed with depression. We make use of Positive-Unlabeled learning paradigm to automatically extract happy moments from social media posts of both controls and users diagnosed with depression, and qualitatively analyze them with linguistic tools such as LIWC and keyness information. We show that the life of depressed individuals is not always bleak, with positive events related to friends and family being more noteworthy to their lives compared to the more mundane happy events reported by control users.