Forecasting the onset and course of mental illness with Twitter data

Forecasting the onset and course of mental illness with Twitter data

We developed computational models to predict the emergence of depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Twitter users. Twitter data and details of depression history were collected from 204 individuals (105 depressed, 99 healthy). We extracted predictive features measuring affect, linguistic style, and context from participant tweets (N = 279,951) and built models using these features with supervised learning algorithms. Resulting models …

Hearing voices is often associated with very serious mental illness and is seen as a “symbol of madness”. However, there are many other situations in which a person may have this experience. This is the perspective of the Listening to Voices Portugal Movement, to whom the most recent episode of the podcast “What Voice Is This?” is dedicated to