By looking at language cues used by those who use Twitter, computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University are able to gather information about common mental health problems, like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, bipolar disorder and Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), according to Medical News Today.
The researchers mined public data by screening Tweets. More than 8 billion Tweets have been used and researchers screen for phrases that relate to symptoms, like "I just don't want to get out of bed," according to Medical News Today. This process has provided health care professionals with fresh data obtained more cost-effectively.
"With many physical illnesses, including the flu, there are lots of quantifiable facts and figures that can be used to study things like how often and where the disease is occurring, which people are most vulnerable and what treatments are most successful," said Glen Coppersmith, a Johns Hopkins senior research scientist, according to Medical News Today. "But it's much tougher and more time-consuming to collect this kind of data about mental illnesses because the underlying causes are so complex and because there is a long-standing stigma that makes even talking about the subject all but taboo."
"We're not aiming to replace the long-standing survey methods of tracking mental illness trends," Coppersmith said, according to Medical News Today. "We believe our new techniques could complement that process. We're trying to show that analyzing tweets could uncover similar results, but could do so more quickly and at a much lower cost."
Coppersmith and his colleagues from the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center have used Twitter posts to target certain geographic areas and analyze mental illness in those regions, according to Medical News Today.
The researchers discovered that PTSD, depression and higher rates of unemployment were more common around areas with military who had been deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan. Not surprising results, but the study shows that Twitter can be used to accurately measure mental health of regions, especially after a conflict or natural disaster.
"Using Twitter to get a fix on mental health cases could be very helpful to health practitioners and governmental officials who need to decide where counseling and other care is needed most," said Mark Dredze, an assistant research professor in the Whiting School of Engineering's Department of Computer Science, according to Medical News Today. "It could point to places where many veterans may be experiencing PTSD, for example, or to towns where people have been traumatized by a shooting spree or widespread tornado damage."
An editorial in the Boston Globe summarized social media's relationship to mental illness tracking perhaps most aptly: "Twitter is, apparently, the quiet therapist to whom we reveal much more that we realize. As such, it could be a valuable public-health tool. More work needs to be done in considering how such information could be used while still preserving privacy, but it's an inquiry worth pursuing."
"Mental health is something that has touched every single one of us at some point in our lives, whether it's a personal experience or watching family or friends go through it," Coppersmith has said, according to Medical News Today. "I don't know how you can't attack this problem. This is the one everyone should care about."