Exploring Social Media Posts for Depression Identification: A Study on Reddit Dataset
This work addresses depression identification for mental health monitoring, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new dataset.
The study tackled the problem of identifying depression by analyzing social media posts from Reddit, achieving an accuracy of 92.28% in predicting depressive versus non-depressive posts using classical machine learning models.
Depression is one of the most common mental disorders affecting an individual's personal and professional life. In this work, we investigated the possibility of utilizing social media posts to identify depression in individuals. To achieve this goal, we conducted a preliminary study where we extracted and analyzed the top Reddit posts made in 2022 from depression-related forums. The collected data were labeled as depressive and non-depressive using UMLS Metathesaurus. Further, the pre-processed data were fed to classical machine learning models, where we achieved an accuracy of 92.28\% in predicting the depressive and non-depressive posts.