Public Opinions on Using Social Media Content to Identify Users With Depression and Target Mental Health Care Advertising: Mixed Methods Survey

Background: Depression is a common disorder that still remains underdiagnosed and undertreated in the UK National Health Service. Charities and voluntary organizations offer mental health services, but they are still struggling to promote these services to the individuals who need them. By analyzing social media (SM) content using machine learning techniques, it may be possible to identify which SM users are currently experiencing low mood, thus enabling the targeted advertising of mental health services to the individuals who would benefit from them. Objective: This study aimed to understand SM users’ opinions of analysis of SM content for depression and targeted advertising on SM for mental health services. Methods: A Web-based, mixed methods, cross-sectional survey was administered to SM users aged 16 years or older within the United Kingdom. It asked participants about their demographics, their usage of SM, and their history of depression and presented structured and open-ended questions on views of SM content being analyzed for depression and views on receiving targeted advertising for mental health services. Results: A total of 183 participants completed the survey, and 114 (62.3%) of them had previously experienced depression. Participants indicated that they posted less during low moods, and they believed that their SM content would not reflect their depression. They could see the possible benefits of identifying depression from SM content but did not believe that the risks to privacy outweighed these benefits. A majority of the participants would not provide consent for such analysis to be conducted on their data and considered it to be intrusive and exposing. Conclusions: In a climate of distrust of SM platforms’ usage of personal data, participants in this survey did not perceive that the benefits of targeting advertisements for mental health services to individuals analyzed as having depression would outweigh the risks to privacy. Future work in this area should proceed with caution and should engage stakeholders at all stages to maximize the transparency and trustworthiness of such research endeavors

Computerized Identification of Mental State for Mental Health Care

Introduction Sebastian, a 30-year-old man, was just diagnosed with depression and is undergoing cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) sessions on a weekly basis. As he goes about his daily routine, he wears a gadget that measures his physiological activity. His therapist enters his physiological data for the week into a computer software at the start of each CBT session. The computer compiles Sebastian's levels of happy and negative affect and pinpoints the times when these reactions peaked. The therapist utilizes this information to track Sebastian's development and dynamically customize the therapy, for as by asking Sebastian to recollect experiences that correlate to some of the emotion peaks

EU law and emotion data

This article sheds light on legal implications and challenges surrounding emotion data processing within the EU's legal framework. Despite the sensitive nature of emotion data, the GDPR does not categorize it as special data, resulting in a lack of comprehensive protection. The article also discusses the nuances of different approaches to affective computing and their relevance to the processing of special data under the GDPR. Moreover, it points to potential tensions with data protection principles, such as fairness and accuracy. Our article also highlights some of the consequences, including harm, that processing of emotion data may have for individuals concerned. Additionally, we discuss how the AI Act proposal intends to regulate affective computing. Finally, the article outlines the new obligations and transparency requirements introduced by the DSA for online platforms utilizing emotion data. Our article aims at raising awareness among the affective computing community about the applicable legal requirements when developing AC systems intended for the EU market, or when working with study participants located in the EU. We also stress the importance of protecting the fundamental rights of individuals even when the law struggles to keep up with technological developments that capture sensitive emotion data.Comment: 8 pages, 2023 11th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII

Rough-set based learning methods: A case study to assess the relationship between the clinical delivery of cannabinoid medicine for anxiety, depression, sleep, patterns and predictability

COVID-19 is an unprecedented health crisis causing a great deal of stress and mental health challenges in populations in Canada. Recently, research is emerging highlighting the potential of cannabinoids’ beneficial effects related to anxiety, mood, and sleep disorders as well as pointing to an increased use of medicinal cannabis since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. Furthermore, evidence points to a correlation between mental health and sleep patterns. The objective of this research is threefold: i) to assess the relationship of the clinical delivery of cannabinoid medicine, by utilizing machine learning, to anxiety, depression and sleep scores; ii) to discover patterns based on patient features such as specific cannabis recommendations, diagnosis information, decreasing/increasing levels of clinical assessment tools (GAD7, PHQ9 and PSQI) scores over a period of time (including during the COVID timeline); and iii) to predict whether new patients could potentially experience either an increase or decrease in clinical assessment tool scores. The dataset for this thesis was derived from patient visits to Ekosi Health Centres in Manitoba, Canada and Ontario, Canada from January, 2019 to April, 2021. Extensive pre-processing and feature engineering was performed. To determine the outcome of a patients treatment, a class feature (Worse, Better, or No Change) indicative of their progress or lack thereof due to the treatment received was introduced. Three well-known supervised machine learning models (tree-based, rule-based and nearest neighbour) were trained on the patient dataset. In addition, seven rough and rough-fuzzy hybrid methods were also trained on the same dataset. All experiments were conducted using a 10-fold CV method. Sensitivity and specificity measures were higher in all classes with rough and rough-fuzzy hybrid methods. The highest accuracy of 99.15% was obtained using the rule-based rough-set learning method.Ekosi Health Center, MitacsMaster of Science in Applied Computer Scienc

Detecting and Classifying Malevolent Dialogue Responses: Taxonomy, Data and Methodology

Conversational interfaces are increasingly popular as a way of connecting people to information. Corpus-based conversational interfaces are able to generate more diverse and natural responses than template-based or retrieval-based agents. With their increased generative capacity of corpusbased conversational agents comes the need to classify and filter out malevolent responses that are inappropriate in terms of content and dialogue acts. Previous studies on the topic of recognizing and classifying inappropriate content are mostly focused on a certain category of malevolence or on single sentences instead of an entire dialogue. In this paper, we define the task of Malevolent Dialogue Response Detection and Classification (MDRDC). We make three contributions to advance research on this task. First, we present a Hierarchical Malevolent Dialogue Taxonomy (HMDT). Second, we create a labelled multi-turn dialogue dataset and formulate the MDRDC task as a hierarchical classification task over this taxonomy. Third, we apply stateof-the-art text classification methods to the MDRDC task and report on extensive experiments aimed at assessing the performance of these approaches.Comment: under review at JASIS

The Effect of Moderation on Online Mental Health Conversations

Many people struggling with mental health issues are unable to access adequate care due to high costs and a shortage of mental health professionals, leading to a global mental health crisis. Online mental health communities can help mitigate this crisis by offering a scalable, easily accessible alternative to in-person sessions with therapists or support groups. However, people seeking emotional or psychological support online may be especially vulnerable to the kinds of antisocial behavior that sometimes occur in online discussions. Moderation can improve online discourse quality, but we lack an understanding of its effects on online mental health conversations. In this work, we leveraged a natural experiment, occurring across 200,000 messages from 7,000 conversations hosted on a mental health mobile application, to evaluate the effects of moderation on online mental health discussions. We found that participation in group mental health discussions led to improvements in psychological perspective, and that these improvements were larger in moderated conversations. The presence of a moderator increased user engagement, encouraged users to discuss negative emotions more candidly, and dramatically reduced bad behavior among chat participants. Moderation also encouraged stronger linguistic coordination, which is indicative of trust building. In addition, moderators who remained active in conversations were especially successful in keeping conversations on topic. Our findings suggest that moderation can serve as a valuable tool to improve the efficacy and safety of online mental health conversations. Based on these findings, we discuss implications and trade-offs involved in designing effective online spaces for mental health support.Comment: Accepted as a full paper at ICWSM 2021. 13 pages, 12 figures, 3 table

Using Word Embeddings to Explore the Language of Depression on Twitter

How do people discuss mental health on social media? Can we train a computer program to recognize differences between discussions of depression and other topics? Can an algorithm predict that someone is depressed from their tweets alone? In this project, we collect tweets referencing “depression” and “depressed” over a seven year period, and train word embeddings to characterize linguistic structures within the corpus. We find that neural word embeddings capture the contextual differences between “depressed” and “healthy” language. We also looked at how context around words may have changed over time to get deeper understanding of contextual shifts in the word usage. Finally, we trained a deep learning network on a much smaller collection of tweets authored by individuals formally diagnosed with depression. The best performing model for the prediction task is Convolutional LSTM (CNN-LSTM) model with a F-score of 69% on test data. The results suggest social media could serve as a valuable screening tool for mental health

Big Data and the Reference Class Problem. What Can We Legitimately Infer about Individuals?

Big data increasingly enables prediction of the behaviour and characteristics of individuals. This is ethically concerning on privacy grounds. However, this article discusses other reasons for concern. These predictions usually rely on generalisations about what certain sorts of people tend to do. Generalisations of this sort are often under scrutiny in legal cases, where, for example, lawyers argue that people with prior convictions are more likely to be guilty of the crime they are currently on trial for. This article applies criteria for distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable generalisations in legal cases to a number of big data examples. It argues that these criteria are helpful, and highlight three issues that should be taken into account when deciding whether predictions about individuals are ethical