With the rise of social media, millions of people are routinely expressing their moods, feelings, and daily struggles with mental health issues on social media platforms like Twitter. Unlike traditional observational cohort studies conducted through questionnaires and self-reported surveys, we explore the reliable detection of clinical depression from tweets obtained unobtrusively. Based on the analysis of tweets crawled from users with self-reported depressive symptoms in their Twitter profiles, we demonstrate the potential for detecting clinical depression symptoms which emulate the PHQ-9 questionnaire clinicians use today. Our study uses a semi-supervised statistical model to evaluate how the duration of these symptoms and their expression on Twitter (in terms of word usage patterns and topical preferences) align with the medical findings reported via the PHQ-9. Our proactive and automatic screening tool is able to identify clinical depressive symptoms with an accuracy of 68% and precision of 72%.

With the proliferation of social media over the last decade, determining people's attitude with respect to a specific topic, document, interaction or events has fueled research interest in natural language processing and introduced a new channel called "sentiment and emotion analysis" [1]. For instance, businesses routinely look to develop systems to automatically understand their customer conversations by identifying the relevant content to enhance marketing their products and managing their reputations [2]. Previous efforts to assess people's sentiment on Twitter have suggested that Twitter may be a valuable resource for studying political sentiment and that it reflects the offline political landscape. According to a Pew Research Center report, in January 2016 44% of US adults stated having learned about the presidential election through social media. Furthermore, 24% reported use of social media posts of the two candidates as a source of news and information, which is more than the 15% who have used both candidates' websites or emails combined (http://j.mp/PewSocM). The first presidential debate between Trump and Hillary was the most tweeted debate ever with 17.1 million tweets.

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