The ubiquity of social media provides a rich opportunity to enhance the data available to mental health clinicians and researchers, enabling a better-informed and better-equipped mental health field. We present analysis of mental health phenomena in publicly available Twitter data, demonstrating how rigorous application of simple natural language processing methods can yield insight into specific disorders as well as mental health writ large, along with evidence that as-of-yet undiscovered linguistic signals relevant to mental health exist in social media. We present a novel method for gathering data for a range of mental illnesses quickly and cheaply, then focus on analysis of four in particular: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, bipolar disorder, and seasonal affective disorder (SAD). We intend for these proof-of-concept results to inform the necessary ethical discussion regarding the balance between the utility of such data and the privacy of mental health related information.

History of mental illness is a major factor behind suicide risk and ideation. However research efforts toward characterizing and forecasting this risk is limited due to the paucity of information regarding suicide ideation, exacerbated by the stigma of mental illness. This paper fills gaps in the literature by developing a statistical methodology to infer which individuals could undergo transitions from mental health discourse to suicidal ideation. We utilize semi-anonymous support communities on Reddit as unobtrusive data sources to infer the likelihood of these shifts. We develop language and interactional measures for this purpose, as well as a propensity score matching based statistical approach. Our approach allows us to derive distinct markers of shifts to suicidal ideation. These markers can be modeled in a prediction framework to identify individuals likely to engage in suicidal ideation in the future. We discuss societal and ethical implications of this research.

Suicide is among the 10 most common causes of death, as assessed by the World Health Organization. For every death by suicide, an estimated 138 people’s lives are meaningfully affected, and almost any other statistic around suicide deaths is equally alarming. The pervasiveness of social media—and the near-ubiquity of mobile devices used to access social media networks—offers new types of data for understanding the behavior of those who (attempt to) take their own lives and suggests new possibilities for preventive intervention. We demonstrate the feasibility of using social media data to detect those at risk for suicide. Specifically, we use natural language processing and machine learning (specifically deep learning) techniques to detect quantifiable signals around suicide attempts, and describe designs for an automated system for estimating suicide risk, usable by those without specialized mental health training (eg, a primary care doctor). We also discuss the ethical use of such technology and examine privacy implications. Currently, this technology is only used for intervention for individuals who have “opted in” for the analysis and intervention, but the technology enables scalable screening for suicide risk, potentially identifying many people who are at risk preventively and prior to any engagement with a health care system. This raises a significant cultural question about the trade-off between privacy and prevention—we have potentially life-saving technology that is currently reaching only a fraction of the possible people at risk because of respect for their privacy. Is the current trade-off between privacy and prevention the right one?

Many significant challenges exist for the mental health field, but one in particular is a lack of data available to guide research. Language provides a natural lens for studying mental health-much existing work and therapy have strong linguistic components, so the creation of a large, varied, language-centric dataset could provide significant grist for the field of mental health research. We examine a broad range of mental health conditions in Twitter data by identifying self-reported statements of diagnosis. We systematically explore language differences between ten conditions with respect to the general population, and to each other. Our aim is to provide guidance and a roadmap for where deeper exploration is likely to be fruitful.

This paper presents a summary of the Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych) 2015 shared and unshared tasks. These tasks aimed to provide apples-to-apples comparisons of various approaches to modeling language relevant to mental health from social media. The data used for these tasks is from Twitter users who state a diagnosis of depression or post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and demographically-matched community controls. The unshared task was a hackathon held at Johns Hopkins University in November 2014 to explore the data, and the shared task was conducted remotely, with each participating team submitted scores for a held-back test set of users. The shared task consisted of three binary classification experiments: (1) depression versus control, (2) PTSD versus control, and (3) depression versus PTSD. Classifiers were compared primarily via their average precision, though a number of other metrics are used along with this to allow a more nuanced interpretation of the performance measures.