Can social media help us reason about mental health?

Millions of people each year suffer from depression, which makes mental illness one of the most serious and widespread health challenges in our society today. There is therefore a need for effective policies, interventions, and prevention strategies that enable early detection and diagnosis of mental health concerns in populations. This talk reports some findings on the potential of leveraging social media postings as a new type of lens in understanding mental illness in individuals and populations. Information gleaned from social media bears potential to complement traditional survey techniques in its ability to provide finer grained measurements of behavior over time while radically expanding population sample sizes. The talk highlights how this research direction may be useful in developing tools for identifying the onset of depressive disorders, for use by healthcare agencies; or on behalf of individuals, enabling those suffering from mental illness to be more proactive about their mental health.