Dynamics of an idiostyle of a Russian suicidal blogger

Abstract

Over 800000 people die of suicide each year. It is estimated that by the year 2020, this figure will have increased to 1.5 million. It is considered to be one of the major causes of mortality during adolescence. Thus there is a growing need for methods of identifying suicidal individuals. Language analysis is known to be a valuable psychodiagnostic tool, however the material for such an analysis is not easy to obtain. Currently as the Internet communications are developing, there is an opportunity to study texts of suicidal individuals. Such an analysis can provide a useful insight into the peculiarities of suicidal thinking, which can be used to further develop methods for diagnosing the risk of suicidal behavior. The paper analyzes the dynamics of a number of linguistic parameters of an idiostyle of a Russian-language blogger who died by suicide. For the first time such an analysis has been conducted using the material of Russian online texts. For text processing, the LIWC program is used. A correlation analysis was performed to identify the relationship between LIWC variables and number of days prior to suicide. Data visualization, as well as comparison with the results of related studies was performed.

Suicide Possibility Scale Detection via Sina Weibo Analytics: Preliminary Results

“…In the case of research on suicide, related texts typically entail the use of LIWC [32], which is a tool for the statistical analysis of corpora using a wide set of dictionaries. Using this tool has become standard in psychological studies on language [33], particularly studies on the language of suicide victims [13,34,35]. The information it provides is also often used in machine-learning algorithms [19? ].…”

Looking for Razors and Needles in a Haystack: Multifaceted Analysis of Suicidal Declarations on Social Media—A Pragmalinguistic Approach

“…The maximal structure of the declaration can contain elements which also appear in other psychological concepts on suicidal risk assessment, based upon, for example, interviews with patients: Suicide Ideation Scale [74,75] and Suicide Intent Scale ( [76], pp. [80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87]. These elements include information about a death wish and its duration (suicidal thoughts), information about readiness to take one's own life, information about the ultimate lethal intent, explanation of one's reasons for this decision, the intended suicide method, information about the current deterrents of active attempt, and information about the current state of preparation (e.g., a suicide note, a final will).…”

“…Researchers use, e.g., the resources of Twitter ( [81], pp. 183-188), blogs (RusSuiCorpus by Litvinova et al (2018) [82]) or forum posts, such as Reddit [83]. The availability of research material and the abundance of texts allows for using a wide range of analytical tools at a previously unprecedented scale: it is possible to combine manual annotation, statistics, machine learning techniques, and sentiment analysis.…”

“…Some studies applying LIWC include psychology in general [95,97,98], studies on language of suicide victims in particular [36][37][38]82], using LIWC categories as additional features to improve machine learning algorithms [99], as well as multidisciplinary studies combining machine learning and psychology [39,40,100,101].…”