Data-driven methods for mental health treatment and surveillance have become a major focus in computational science research in the last decade. However, progress in the domain, in terms of both medical understanding and system performance, remains bounded by the availability of adequate data. Prior systematic reviews have not necessarily made it possible to measure the degree to which data-related challenges have affected research progress. In this paper, we offer an analysis specifically on the state of social media data that exists for conducting mental health research. We do so by introducing an open-source directory of mental health datasets, annotated using a standardized schema to facilitate meta-analysis.
Mental health remains a significant challenge of public health worldwide. With increasing popularity of online platforms, many use the platforms to share their mental health conditions, express their feelings, and seek help from the community and counselors. Some of these platforms, such as Reachout, are dedicated forums where the users register to seek help. Others such as Reddit provide subreddits where the users publicly but anonymously post their mental health distress. Although posts are of varying length, it is beneficial to provide a short, but informative summary for fast processing by…
Georgetown University（乔治城大学）；Ghent University（根特大学）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；National Institutes of Health（美国国立卫生研究院）
Self-reported diagnosis statements have been widely employed in studying language related to mental health in social media. However, existing research has largely ignored the temporality of mental health diagnoses. In this work, we introduce RSDD-Time: a new dataset of 598 manually annotated self-reported depression diagnosis posts from Reddit that include temporal information about the diagnosis. Annotations include whether a mental health condition is present and how recently the diagnosis happened. Furthermore, we include exact temporal spans that relate to the date of diagnosis. This infor…
MentalQA: An Annotated Arabic Corpus for Questions and Answers of Mental Healthcare
College of Computing（计算机学院）；Umm Al-Qura University（乌姆·古拉大学）；King Khalid University（哈立德国王大学）；College of Computer and Information Sciences（计算机与信息科学学院）；King Saud University（沙特国王大学）
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；University of Moratuwa（莫拉图瓦大学）；University of Colombo School of Computing（科伦坡大学计算学院）；University of Colombo（科伦坡大学）
People often utilise online media (e.g., Facebook, Reddit) as a platform to express their psychological distress and seek support. State-of-the-art NLP techniques demonstrate strong potential to automatically detect mental health issues from text. Research suggests that mental health issues are reflected in emotions (e.g., sadness) indicated in a person's choice of language. Therefore, we developed a novel emotion-annotated mental health corpus (EmoMent), consisting of 2802 Facebook posts (14845 sentences) extracted from two South Asian countries - Sri Lanka and India. Three clinical psycholog…
University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学）；Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）
In this paper, we analyze the interplay between the use of offensive language and mental health. We acquired publicly available datasets created for offensive language identification and depression detection and we train computational models to compare the use of offensive language in social media posts written by groups of individuals with and without self-reported depression diagnosis. We also look at samples written by groups of individuals whose posts show signs of depression according to recent related studies. Our analysis indicates that offensive language is more frequently used in the …
Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Mila, Québec AI Institute（米拉魁北克人工智能研究所）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Mental health is a critical issue in modern society, and mental disorders could sometimes turn to suicidal ideation without adequate treatment. Early detection of mental disorders and suicidal ideation from social content provides a potential way for effective social intervention. Recent advances in pretrained contextualized language representations have promoted the development of several domain-specific pretrained models and facilitated several downstream applications. However, there are no existing pretrained language models for mental healthcare. This paper trains and release two pretraine…
Georgetown University（乔治城大学）；Ghent University（根特大学）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
Mental health is a significant and growing public health concern. As language usage can be leveraged to obtain crucial insights into mental health conditions, there is a need for large-scale, labeled, mental health-related datasets of users who have been diagnosed with one or more of such conditions. In this paper, we investigate the creation of high-precision patterns to identify self-reported diagnoses of nine different mental health conditions, and obtain high-quality labeled data without the need for manual labelling. We introduce the SMHD (Self-reported Mental Health Diagnoses) dataset an…
Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Compared to physical health, population mental health measurement in the U.S. is very coarse-grained. Currently, in the largest population surveys, such as those carried out by the Centers for Disease Control or Gallup, mental health is only broadly captured through "mentally unhealthy days" or "sadness", and limited to relatively infrequent state or metropolitan estimates. Through the large scale analysis of social media data, robust estimation of population mental health is feasible at much higher resolutions, up to weekly estimates for counties. In the present work, we validate a pipeline t…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
We introduce initial groundwork for estimating suicide risk and mental health in a deep learning framework. By modeling multiple conditions, the system learns to make predictions about suicide risk and mental health at a low false positive rate. Conditions are modeled as tasks in a multi-task learning (MTL) framework, with gender prediction as an additional auxiliary task. We demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-task learning by comparison to a well-tuned single-task baseline with the same number of parameters. Our best MTL model predicts potential suicide attempt, as well as the presence of…
Leveraging LLMs for Translating and Classifying Mental Health Data
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina（计算机科学与工程系，希腊伊奥亚纳大学）；LT3, IDLab, Universiteit Gent（LT3，IDLab，比利时根特大学）；Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business（信息系，希腊经济与商业大学）；Archimedes/AthenaRC, Greece（阿基米德/阿提卡RC，希腊）
Cross-Lingual Mental Health Ontologies for Indian Languages: Bridging Patient Expression and Clinical Understanding through Explainable AI and Human-in-the-Loop Validation
University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；University of Kansas（堪萨斯大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；IIT Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
North Africa's Missing Framework: NLP-Driven Mental Healthcare in Algeria and Implications for Low-resource Settings
University Mohamed El Bachir El Ibrahimi of Bordj Bou Arreridj（布吉布阿雷里吉·穆罕默德·巴希尔·易卜拉欣大学）；Laboratory of Informatics and its Applications of M’sila（姆西拉信息学及其应用实验室）；Laboratory of Materials and Electronic Systems（材料与电子系统实验室）
Large Language Models for Mental Health Diagnostic Assessments: Exploring The Potential of Large Language Models for Assisting with Mental Health Diagnostic Assessments -- The Depression and Anxiety Case
Indian Institute of Research and Science, Bhopal（博帕尔印度研究与科学学院）；Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur（克勒格布尔印度理工学院）
The mental disorder of online users is determined using social media posts. The major challenge in this domain is to avail the ethical clearance for using the user generated text on social media platforms. Academic re searchers identified the problem of insufficient and unlabeled data for mental health classification. To handle this issue, we have studied the effect of data augmentation techniques on domain specific user generated text for mental health classification. Among the existing well established data augmentation techniques, we have identified Easy Data Augmentation (EDA), conditional…
Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology（塔帕尔工程技术学院）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
With recent developments in digitization of clinical psychology, NLP research community has revolutionized the field of mental health detection on social media. Existing research in mental health analysis revolves around the cross-sectional studies to classify users' intent on social media. For in-depth analysis, we investigate existing classifiers to solve the problem of causal categorization which suggests the inefficiency of learning based methods due to limited training samples. To handle this challenge, we use transformer models and demonstrate the efficacy of a pre-trained transfer learn…
Mental-LLM: Leveraging Large Language Models for Mental Health Prediction via Online Text Data
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Massachusetts Lowell（马萨诸塞大学洛厄尔分校）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Many statistical models have high accuracy on test benchmarks, but are not explainable, struggle in low-resource scenarios, cannot be reused for multiple tasks, and cannot easily integrate domain expertise. These factors limit their use, particularly in settings such as mental health, where it is difficult to annotate datasets and model outputs have significant impact. We introduce a micromodel architecture to address these challenges. Our approach allows researchers to build interpretable representations that embed domain knowledge and provide explanations throughout the model's decision proc…
Pattern Recognition Center, WeChat AI, Tencent Inc（腾讯公司微信人工智能模式识别中心）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Previous researches on dialogue system assessment usually focus on the quality evaluation (e.g. fluency, relevance, etc) of responses generated by the chatbots, which are local and technical metrics. For a chatbot which responds to millions of online users including minors, we argue that it should have a healthy mental tendency in order to avoid the negative psychological impact on them. In this paper, we establish several mental health assessment dimensions for chatbots (depression, anxiety, alcohol addiction, empathy) and introduce the questionnaire-based mental health assessment methods. We…
The COVID-19 pandemic, like many of the disease outbreaks that have preceded it, is likely to have a profound effect on mental health. Understanding its impact can inform strategies for mitigating negative consequences. In this work, we seek to better understand the effects of COVID-19 on mental health by examining discussions within mental health support communities on Reddit. First, we quantify the rate at which COVID-19 is discussed in each community, or subreddit, in order to understand levels of preoccupation with the pandemic. Next, we examine the volume of activity in order to determine…
Mental health challenges are thought to afflict around 10% of the global population each year, with many going untreated due to stigma and limited access to services. Here, we explore trends in words and phrases related to mental health through a collection of 1- , 2-, and 3-grams parsed from a data stream of roughly 10% of all English tweets since 2012. We examine temporal dynamics of mental health language, finding that the popularity of the phrase 'mental health' increased by nearly two orders of magnitude between 2012 and 2018. We observe that mentions of 'mental health' spike annually and…
ProMind-LLM: Proactive Mental Health Care via Causal Reasoning with Sensor Data
California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；UCLA（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；TAO Connect, Inc.（TAO Connect公司）
As the popularity of social media platforms continues to rise, an ever-increasing amount of human communication and self- expression takes place online. Most recent research has focused on mining social media for public user opinion about external entities such as product reviews or sentiment towards political news. However, less attention has been paid to analyzing users' internalized thoughts and emotions from a mental health perspective. In this paper, we quantify the semantic difference between public Tweets and private mental health journals used in online cognitive behavioral therapy. We…
Many people struggling with mental health issues are unable to access adequate care due to high costs and a shortage of mental health professionals, leading to a global mental health crisis. Online mental health communities can help mitigate this crisis by offering a scalable, easily accessible alternative to in-person sessions with therapists or support groups. However, people seeking emotional or psychological support online may be especially vulnerable to the kinds of antisocial behavior that sometimes occur in online discussions. Moderation can improve online discourse quality, but we lack…
Can Artificial Intelligence Support Healthcare and Mental Health Through Early Cyberbullying Detection ? The Impact of Emotion-Aware AI on Proactive Online Safety
Faculty of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick（新不伦瑞克大学计算机科学学院）；Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University（东北大学库里计算机科学学院）
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Jožef Stefan Institute（约瑟夫·斯特凡研究所）
We describe a set of experiments for building a temporal mental health dynamics system. We utilise a pre-existing methodology for distant-supervision of mental health data mining from social media platforms and deploy the system during the global COVID-19 pandemic as a case study. Despite the challenging nature of the task, we produce encouraging results, both explicit to the global pandemic and implicit to a global phenomenon, Christmas Depression, supported by the literature. We propose a methodology for providing insight into temporal mental health dynamics to be utilised for strategic deci…
Large language models (LLM) have been successful in several natural language understanding tasks and could be relevant for natural language processing (NLP)-based mental health application research. In this work, we report the performance of LLM-based ChatGPT (with gpt-3.5-turbo backend) in three text-based mental health classification tasks: stress detection (2-class classification), depression detection (2-class classification), and suicidality detection (5-class classification). We obtained annotated social media posts for the three classification tasks from public datasets. Then ChatGPT AP…
INESC-ID Lisboa（里斯本INESC-ID研究所）；Instituto Superior Técnico（高等技术学院）；Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学）；Qntfy（Qntfy公司）；Universidade Europeia（欧洲大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Mental illnesses adversely affect a significant proportion of the population worldwide. However, the methods traditionally used for estimating and characterizing the prevalence of mental health conditions are time-consuming and expensive. Consequently, best-available estimates concerning the prevalence of mental health conditions are often years out of date. Automated approaches to supplement these survey methods with broad, aggregated information derived from social media content provides a potential means for near real-time estimates at scale. These may, in turn, provide grist for supporting…
NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London（英国国立卫生研究院生物医学研究中心（位于南伦敦和莫兹利 NHS 基金会信托及伦敦国王学院））；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Multimorbidity research in mental health services requires data from physical health conditions which is traditionally limited in mental health care electronic health records. In this study, we aimed to extract data from physical health conditions from clinical notes using SemEHR. Data was extracted from Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS) system at South London and Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre (SLaM BRC) and the cohort consisted of all individuals who had received a primary or secondary diagnosis of severe mental illness between 2007 and 2018. Three pairs of annotators annotated …
