Automatic detection of depression symptoms in twitter using multimodal analysis

Understanding social media discourse on antidepressants: unsupervised and sentiment analysis using X

BACKGROUND

Antidepressants are essential in managing depression, including treatment-resistant cases. Public perceptions of these medications, shaped by social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), can influence treatment adherence and outcomes. This study explores public attitudes toward antidepressants through sentiment and topic modeling analysis of tweets in English and Spanish from 2007 to 2022.

METHODS

Tweets mentioning antidepressants approved for depression were collected. The analysis focused on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and glutamatergic drugs. Sentiment analysis and topic modeling were conducted to identify trends, concerns, and emotions in discussions across both languages.

RESULTS

A total of 1,448,674 tweets were analyzed (1,013,128 in English and 435,546 in Spanish). SSRIs were the most mentioned antidepressants (27.9% in English, 58.91% in Spanish). Pricing and availability were key concerns in English tweets, while Spanish tweets highlighted availability, efficacy, and sexual side effects. Glutamatergic drugs, especially esketamine, gained attention (15.61% in English, 25.23% in Spanish), evoking emotions such as fear, sadness, and anger. Temporal analysis showed significant increases in discussions, with peaks in 2012 and 2021 for SSRIs in Spanish, and exponential growth from 2018 to 2021 for glutamatergic drugs. Emotional tones varied across languages, reflecting cultural differences.

CONCLUSIONS

Social media platforms like X provide valuable insights into public perceptions of antidepressants, highlighting cultural variations in attitudes. Understanding these perceptions can help clinicians address concerns and misconceptions, fostering informed treatment decisions. The limitations of social media data call for careful interpretation, emphasizing the need for continued research to improve pharmacovigilance and public health strategies.

Using YouTube Comments Data to Explore Postpartum Depression in Social Media: An Infodemiology Study

BACKGROUND

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a prevalent mental health issue profoundly impacting both parents and their families. This study examines YouTube comments to identify common public discourse and prevalent themes surrounding PPD.

METHODS

We analyzed 4915 comments from 33 YouTube videos to provide a comprehensive picture of PPD-related discourse on social media. We analyzed data using engagement metrics and Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis.

RESULTS

The engagement metrics indicated that public discourse is primarily focused on the stigma associated with PPD in men and celebrities, with related videos receiving significant attention and high engagement metrics score. Thematic analysis revealed two themes: (1) perspectives of stigmatized, stigmatizer and people in between; and (2) adaptation despite adversity.

CONCLUSION

This study provides key insights into public discourse on PPD. It highlights the importance of family and community support and advocates for a healthcare system capable of addressing the needs of stigmatized populations. A significant finding of this study is the call for action to raise awareness and debunk myths about PPD. Misconceptions worsen stigma and deter help-seeking by affected individuals. Awareness initiatives are crucial to enhance public understanding of PPD symptoms, its impact on individuals and families, and the importance of parental mental health.

Postgraduate psychological stress detection from social media using BERT-Fused model

Postgraduate students face various academic, personal, and social stressors that increase their risk of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Identifying cost-effective methods of detecting and intervening before stress turns into severe problems is crucial. However, existing stress detection methods typically rely on psychological scales or devices, which can be complex and expensive. Therefore, we propose a BERT-fused model for rapidly and automatically detecting postgraduate students' psychological stress via social media. First, we construct an improved BERT-LDA feature extraction algorithm to extract group stress features from large-scale and complex social media data. Then, we integrate the BiLSTM-CRF named entity recognition model to construct a multi-dimensional psychological stress profile and analyze the fine-grained feature representation under the fusion of multi-dimensional features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms traditional models such as BiLSTM, achieving an accuracy of 92.55%, a recall of 93.47%, and an F1-score of 92.18%, with F1-scores exceeding 89% for all three types of entities. This research provides both theoretical and practical foundations for universities or institutions to conduct fine-grained perception and intervention for postgraduate students' psychological stress.

Mental illness detection through harvesting social media: a comprehensive literature review

Mental illness is a common disease that at its extremes leads to personal and societal suffering. A complicated multi-factorial disease, mental illness is influenced by a number of socioeconomic and clinical factors, including individual risk factors. Traditionally, approaches relying on personal interviews and filling out questionnaires have been employed to diagnose mental illness; however, these manual procedures have been found to be frequently prone to errors and unable to reliably identify individuals with mental illness. Fortunately, people with mental illnesses frequently express their ailments on social media, making it possible to more precisely identify mental disease by harvesting their social media posts. This study offers a thorough analysis of how to identify mental illnesses (more specifically, depression) from users' social media data. Along with the explanation of data acquisition, preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification techniques, the most recent published literature is presented to give the readers a thorough understanding of the subject. Since, in the recent past, the majority of the relevant scientific community has focused on using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models to identify mental illness, so the review also focuses on these techniques and along with their detail, their critical analysis is presented. More than 100 DL, ML, and natural language processing (NLP) based models developed for mental illness in the recent past have been reviewed, and their technical contributions and strengths are discussed. There exist multiple review studies, however, discussing extensive recent literature along with the complete road map on how to design a mental illness detection system using social media data and ML and DL classification methods is limited. The review also includes detail on how a dataset may be acquired from social media platforms, how it is preprocessed, and features are extracted from it to employ for mental illness detection. Hence, we anticipate that this review will help readers learn more and give them a comprehensive road map for identifying mental illnesses using users' social media data.

Automatic diagnosis of depression based on attention mechanism and feature pyramid model

Currently, most diagnoses of depression are evaluated by medical professionals, with the results of these evaluations influenced by the subjective judgment of physicians. Physiological studies have shown that depressed patients display facial movements, head posture, and gaze direction disorders. To accurately diagnose the degree of depression of patients, this paper proposes a comprehensive framework, Cross-Channel Attentional Depression Detection Network, which can automatically diagnose the degree of depression of patients by inputting information from the facial images of depressed patients. Specifically, the comprehensive framework is composed of three main modules: (1) Face key point detection and cropping for video images based on Multi-Task Convolutional Neural Network. (2) The improved Feature Pyramid Networks model can fuse shallow features and deep features in video images and reduce the loss of miniscule features. (3) A proposed Cross-Channel Attention Convolutional Neural Network can enhance the interaction between tensor channel layers. Compared to other methods for automatic depression identification, a superior method was obtained by conducting extensive experiments on the depression dataset AVEC 2014, where the Root Mean Square Error and the Mean Absolute Error were 8.65 and 6.66, respectively.

Machine Learning for Multimodal Mental Health Detection: A Systematic Review of Passive Sensing Approaches

As mental health (MH) disorders become increasingly prevalent, their multifaceted symptoms and comorbidities with other conditions introduce complexity to diagnosis, posing a risk of underdiagnosis. While machine learning (ML) has been explored to mitigate these challenges, we hypothesized that multiple data modalities support more comprehensive detection and that non-intrusive collection approaches better capture natural behaviors. To understand the current trends, we systematically reviewed 184 studies to assess feature extraction, feature fusion, and ML methodologies applied to detect MH disorders from passively sensed multimodal data, including audio and video recordings, social media, smartphones, and wearable devices. Our findings revealed varying correlations of modality-specific features in individualized contexts, potentially influenced by demographics and personalities. We also observed the growing adoption of neural network architectures for model-level fusion and as ML algorithms, which have demonstrated promising efficacy in handling high-dimensional features while modeling within and cross-modality relationships. This work provides future researchers with a clear taxonomy of methodological approaches to multimodal detection of MH disorders to inspire future methodological advancements. The comprehensive analysis also guides and supports future researchers in making informed decisions to select an optimal data source that aligns with specific use cases based on the MH disorder of interest.

MHA: a multimodal hierarchical attention model for depression detection in social media

As a serious mental disease, depression causes great harm to the physical and mental health of individuals, and becomes an important cause of suicide. Therefore, it is necessary to accurately identify and treat depressed patients. Compared with traditional clinical diagnosis methods, a large amount of real and different types of data on social media provides new ideas for depression detection research. In this paper, we construct a depression detection data set based on Weibo, and propose a Multimodal Hierarchical Attention (MHA) model for social media depression detection. Multimodal data is fed into the model and the attention mechanism is applied within and between modalities at the same time. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves the best classification performance. In addition, we propose a distribution normalization method, which can optimize the data distribution and improve the accuracy of depression detection.

Textual Analysis of Tweets Associated with Domestic Violence

Background

Domestic violence is a global public health concern as stated by World Health Organization. We aimed to conduct a textual analysis of tweets associated with domestic violence through keyword identification, word trends and word collocations. The data was obtained from Twitter, focusing on publicly available tweets written in English. The objectives are to find out if the identified keywords, word trends and word collocations can help differentiate between domestic violence-related tweets and non-domestic violence-related tweets, as well as, to analyze the textual characteristics of domestic violence-related tweets and non-domestic violence-related tweets.

Methods

Overall, 11,041 tweets were collected using a few keywords over a period of 15 days from 22 March 2021 to 5 April 2021. A text analysis approach was used to discover the most frequent keywords used, the word trends of those keywords and the word collocations of the keywords in differentiating between domestic violence-related or non-domestic violence-related tweets.

Results

Domestic violence-related tweets and non-domestic violence-related tweets had differentiating characteristics, despite sharing several main keywords. In particular, keywords like "domestic", "violence" and "suicide" featured prominently in domestic-violence related tweets but not in non-domestic violence-related tweets. Significant differences could also be seen in the frequency of keywords and the word trends in the collection of the tweets.

Conclusion

These findings are significant in helping to automate the flagging of domestic-violence related tweets and alert the authorities so that they can take proactive steps such as assisting the victims in getting medical, police and legal help as needed.

Artificial intelligence assisted tools for the detection of anxiety and depression leading to suicidal ideation in adolescents: a review

Epidemiological studies report high levels of anxiety and depression amongst adolescents. These psychiatric conditions and complex interplays of biological, social and environmental factors are important risk factors for suicidal behaviours and suicide, which show a peak in late adolescence and early adulthood. Although deaths by suicide have fallen globally in recent years, suicide deaths are increasing in some countries, such as the US. Suicide prevention is a challenging global public health problem. Currently, there aren't any validated clinical biomarkers for suicidal diagnosis, and traditional methods exhibit limitations. Artificial intelligence (AI) is budding in many fields, including in the diagnosis of medical conditions. This review paper summarizes recent studies (past 8 years) that employed AI tools for the automated detection of depression and/or anxiety disorder and discusses the limitations and effects of some modalities. The studies assert that AI tools produce promising results and could overcome the limitations of traditional diagnostic methods. Although using AI tools for suicidal ideation exhibits limitations, these are outweighed by the advantages. Thus, this review article also proposes extracting a fusion of features such as facial images, speech signals, and visual and clinical history features from deep models for the automated detection of depression and/or anxiety disorder in individuals, for future work. This may pave the way for the identification of individuals with suicidal thoughts.

Advancing translational research in neuroscience through multi-task learning

Translational research in neuroscience is increasingly focusing on the analysis of multi-modal data, in order to account for the biological complexity of suspected disease mechanisms. Recent advances in machine learning have the potential to substantially advance such translational research through the simultaneous analysis of different data modalities. This review focuses on one of such approaches, the so-called "multi-task learning" (MTL), and describes its potential utility for multi-modal data analyses in neuroscience. We summarize the methodological development of MTL starting from conventional machine learning, and present several scenarios that appear particularly suitable for its application. For these scenarios, we highlight different types of MTL algorithms, discuss emerging technological adaptations, and provide a step-by-step guide for readers to apply the MTL approach in their own studies. With its ability to simultaneously analyze multiple data modalities, MTL may become an important element of the analytics repertoire used in future neuroscience research and beyond.

An optimized deep learning approach for suicide detection through Arabic tweets

Many people worldwide suffer from mental illnesses such as major depressive disorder (MDD), which affect their thoughts, behavior, and quality of life. Suicide is regarded as the second leading cause of death among teenagers when treatment is not received. Twitter is a platform for expressing their emotions and thoughts about many subjects. Many studies, including this one, suggest using social media data to track depression and other mental illnesses. Even though Arabic is widely spoken and has a complex syntax, depressive detection methods have not been applied to the language. The Arabic tweets dataset should be scraped and annotated first. Then, a complete framework for categorizing tweet inputs into two classes (such as Normal or Suicide) is suggested in this study. The article also proposes an Arabic tweet preprocessing algorithm that contrasts lemmatization, stemming, and various lexical analysis methods. Experiments are conducted using Twitter data scraped from the Internet. Five different annotators have annotated the data. Performance metrics are reported on the suggested dataset using the latest Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) models. The measured performance metrics are balanced accuracy, specificity, F1-score, IoU, ROC, Youden Index, NPV, and weighted sum metric (WSM). Regarding USE models, the best-weighted sum metric (WSM) is 80.2%, and with regards to Arabic BERT models, the best WSM is 95.26%.

Text Analysis of Evolving Emotions and Sentiments in COVID-19 Twitter Communication

Scientists and regular citizens alike search for ways to manage the widespread effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. While scientists are busy in their labs, other citizens often turn to online sources to report their experiences and concerns and to seek and share knowledge of the virus. The text generated by those users in online social media platforms can provide valuable insights about evolving users' opinions and attitudes. The objective of this research is to analyze text of such user disclosures to study human communication during a pandemic in four primary ways. First, we analyze Twitter tweet information, generated throughout the pandemic, to understand users' communications concerning COVID-19 and how those communications have evolved during the pandemic. Second, we analyze linguistic sentiment concepts (analytic, authentic, clout, and tone concepts) in different Twitter settings (sentiment in tweets with pictures or no pictures and tweets versus retweets). Third, we investigate the relationship between Twitter tweets with additional forms of internet activity, namely, Google searches and Wikipedia page views. Finally, we create and use a dictionary of specific COVID-19-related concepts (e.g., symptom of lost taste) to assess how the use of those concepts in tweets are related to the spread of information and the resulting influence of Twitter users. The analysis showed a surprisingly lack of emotion in the initial phases of the pandemic as people were information seeking. As time progressed, there were more expressions of sentiment, including anger. Further, tweets with and without pictures and/or video had statistically significant differences in text sentiment characteristics. Similarly, there were differences between the sentiment in tweets and retweets and tweets. We also found that Google and Wikipedia searches were predictive of sentiment in the tweets. Finally, a variable representing a dictionary of COVID-related concepts was statistically significant when related to users' Twitter influence score and number of retweets, illustrating the general impact of COVID-19 on Twitter and human communication. Overall, the results provide insights into human communication as well as models of human internet and social media use. These findings could be useful for the management of global challenges beyond, or different from, a pandemic.

Detecting Depression Signs on Social Media: A Systematic Literature Review

Among mental health diseases, depression is one of the most severe, as it often leads to suicide; due to this, it is important to identify and summarize existing evidence concerning depression sign detection research on social media using the data provided by users. This review examines aspects of primary studies exploring depression detection from social media submissions (from 2016 to mid-2021). The search for primary studies was conducted in five digital libraries: ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore Digital Library, SpringerLink, Science Direct, and PubMed, as well as on the search engine Google Scholar to broaden the results. Extracting and synthesizing the data from each paper was the main activity of this work. Thirty-four primary studies were analyzed and evaluated. Twitter was the most studied social media for depression sign detection. Word embedding was the most prominent linguistic feature extraction method. Support vector machine (SVM) was the most used machine-learning algorithm. Similarly, the most popular computing tool was from Python libraries. Finally, cross-validation (CV) was the most common statistical analysis method used to evaluate the results obtained. Using social media along with computing tools and classification methods contributes to current efforts in public healthcare to detect signs of depression from sources close to patients.

Digital phenotype of mood disorders: A conceptual and critical review

BACKGROUND

Mood disorders are commonly diagnosed and staged using clinical features that rely merely on subjective data. The concept of digital phenotyping is based on the idea that collecting real-time markers of human behavior allows us to determine the digital signature of a pathology. This strategy assumes that behaviors are quantifiable from data extracted and analyzed through digital sensors, wearable devices, or smartphones. That concept could bring a shift in the diagnosis of mood disorders, introducing for the first time additional examinations on psychiatric routine care.

OBJECTIVE

The main objective of this review was to propose a conceptual and critical review of the literature regarding the theoretical and technical principles of the digital phenotypes applied to mood disorders.

METHODS

We conducted a review of the literature by updating a previous article and querying the PubMed database between February 2017 and November 2021 on titles with relevant keywords regarding digital phenotyping, mood disorders and artificial intelligence.

RESULTS

Out of 884 articles included for evaluation, 45 articles were taken into account and classified by data source (multimodal, actigraphy, ECG, smartphone use, voice analysis, or body temperature). For depressive episodes, the main finding is a decrease in terms of functional and biological parameters [decrease in activities and walking, decrease in the number of calls and SMS messages, decrease in temperature and heart rate variability (HRV)], while the manic phase produces the reverse phenomenon (increase in activities, number of calls and HRV).

CONCLUSION

The various studies presented support the potential interest in digital phenotyping to computerize the clinical characteristics of mood disorders.