Detecting mental health issues through social media
What if social media could be used to monitor users’ mental health? That is the goal of the Canadian research project “Mood,” in which two researchers from Montpellier—based at the Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics, and Microelectronics (University of Montpellier – CNRS)—are participating.
Every minute on Facebook, 293,000 status updates are posted, 510,000 comments are made, and 136,000 photos are uploaded. This is a veritable goldmine of data for researchers—and soon for doctors, who will be able to monitor patients with mental health issues through their social media posts.
How?“Using text mining and discourse analysis tools that help us understand what users are feeling by deciphering their posts,” explain Sandra Bringay and Jérôme Azé, researchers at the Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics, and Microelectronics (LIRMM, University of Montpellier – CNRS).“We’re developing algorithms that can, for example, identify emotions like sadness or self-loathing in online discourse to spot internet users who are struggling,” explains Sandra Bringay.
Prevention 2.0
What about privacy?“The Mood project isn’t designed to track specific users; it works with anonymous data, ” the researcher reassures us. However, it does provide a better understanding of how people express themselves and allows researchers to test the algorithms they’ve developed. “These results could be used by doctors, for example to monitor the mental health of their patients—who would have given their consent, of course, ”explains Sandra Bringay.
“Identifying patients suffering from depression, anorexia, or who are victims of bullying through social media will allow for better care,” the researchers predict. These findings could be particularly useful in suicide prevention, which claims three times as many lives each year as traffic accidents.