Detecting Mental Health Disorders 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 their patients with mental health disorders through their social media posts.
How?“Using text mining and discourse analysis tools that help us understand how 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 such as 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 internet 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 findings 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 on social media who suffer from depression, anorexia, or who are victims of bullying will allow us to provide them with 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.