Sanghani Center research takes new approach to analyze depression, anxiety from Reddit posts to provide better care, lower suicide rate

A group of Ph.D. students and their advisor at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics are addressing the growing mental health crisis, particularly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, by analyzing social media content. They are focusing on Reddit, a platform where users openly discuss their mental health concerns. Suicide, which ranks as the 10th leading cause of death among adults in the US and the third leading cause among young individuals, often stems from underlying mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, or bipolar disorder.

The researchers have developed a unique approach to understand and predict mental health issues on Reddit. Instead of relying solely on the subreddit topics like r/Anxiety or r/Depression, they designed a multi-label classification system that considers the words and phrases used in posts. By assigning scores to various mental health topics based on the language used, they aim to better capture the nuances of users’ mental health struggles. This approach acknowledges that a single post might touch on multiple mental health concerns.

Shailik Sarkar and his team received recognition for their paper, “Predicting Depression and Anxiety on Reddit: a Multi-task Learning Approach,” earning the Best Paper Award at a prominent conference. The researchers emphasize the importance of understanding the language employed by individuals dealing with mental health issues. They believe that their model could assist mental health practitioners and social workers in gaining insights into users’ experiences, ultimately helping to prevent suicide.

The researchers stress their commitment to user privacy and anonymity in their Reddit-based research. They also highlight that their work addresses the challenge of limited benchmark data for this kind of research, offering insights into active learning techniques that could be useful to other data scientists working in human-centered computing or social media data mining.