2017 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics
Detecting and Treating Mental Illness on Social Networks
Akkapon Wongkoblap1 Miguel A. Vadillo2, 3
1 2
Department of Informatics Departamento de Psicología Básica
King’s College London Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
London, United Kingdom Madrid, Spain
akkapon.wongkoblap@kcl.ac.uk miguel.vadillo@uam.es
Abstract—Mental illness is becoming a serious global health
problem worldwide, with a growing number of patients suffering
from depression, anxiety and other disorders. New solutions are
needed to tackle this issue. The main goal of this research project
is to develop prediction models to classify users with poor mental
health from social network data and then implement an
intervention model to help these users.
Keywords—machine learning; predictive models; mental
health; mental disorders
I. INTRODUCTION
Mental illness is one of the most serious global health
problems, with a growing number of patients suffering from
depression, anxiety and other disorders. In England only,
around 16.7% of the population get diagnosed with a common
mental illness, while over 350 million patients worldwide are
suffering from mental disorders. Mental disorders also impact
on global economy, with a cost of US$2.5 trillion in 2010 and
an estimated expenditure of US$6 trillion by 2030. However,
there still is a shortage of mental health services. In light of
these figures, a new intervention approach is required.
II. METHODS
A. Data collection
Participants will be approached through recruitment
websites. All participants who agree to contribute to the study
will be asked to submit a set of questionnaires 4 times during a
2-month interval to measure the levels and changing patterns of
mental health problems. All of them will be then asked to
provide informed consent to access their profile. To improve
the performance of predictive models, actual patients with a
clinical diagnosis of mental illness who regularly use social
networking will also be recruited.
I will develop a web application, connecting to social
network providers via application programming interfaces to
pool profile data with participant-provided permission. This
application will allow participants to submit questionnaires and
provide the consent to profile access. Collected data will
include profile information, posts, posting time, images,
friends, the number of friends, and check-ins.
Along this information, a survey will be carried out to
investigate participants’ concerns about using social network
data to monitor their health information.
978-1-5090-4881-6/17 $31.00 © 2017 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICHI.2017.24
Vasa Curcin1, 2
3
Division of Health & Social Care Research
King’s College London
London, United Kingdom
vasa.curcin@kcl.ac.uk
B. Data analysis
Levels of mental health collected with questionnaires and
posts pooled will be used to extract relevant features. Then,
statistical analyses will be executed to detect significant
correlations between levels and features, which will be selected
to build predictive models. Machine learning algorithms will
be used to train predictive models to detect users with poor
mental health.
This powerful predictive model will allow us to detect users
with poor mental health and provide them interventions (e.g.,
health information links, and health services) on social network
platforms.
III. PRELIMINARY RESULTS
A pilot study was conducted to investigate the feasibility of
building classification models. Data from over 6,500
participants submitting the Center for Epidemiological Studies-
Depression (CES-D) questionnaire were downloaded from
myPersonality project. Only 940 of them provided permission
to access their Facebook profile. CES-D scores from these
volunteers are displayed in Fig. 1 (a), where users with CES-D
scores over 22 are classified as depressed. Features were
extracted from posts using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count
(LIWC) and used as inputs to predict the status of participants
as depressed or non-depressed. Inputs and output from each
participant were used to train and test the set of predictive
models displayed in Fig. 1 (b). To further analyse, CES-D
scores were positively correlated with 1st person singular
pronoun and sad word usage, while negatively correlated with
analytical thinking (e.g., posting in more narrative ways).
Fig. 1. (a) Histogram of CES-D scores, and (b) Predictive performance
These results show that social network data are a valuable
source of information to predict mental health issues.
Understanding the factors associated with symptoms of mental
illnesses can contribute to the early detection and treatment of
social network users with poor mental health.
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