Impact of Social Networking Sites on Post-Partum Depression in Women: An Analysis in the Context of Bangladesh

Postpartum Depression (PPD) refers to moderate or severe depression in a woman after childbirth. It is strikingly common in new mothers from all regions of the world with a prevalence of around 10-15%. PPD can have severe adverse effects on maternal and child health, such as suicidal tendency of the mother, infanticide as well as poor cognitive and developmental growth of the child. Despite this, few women seek medical attention due to ignorance, negligence and financial limitations; the latter is especially true for those who live in developing countries. Nowadays, social networking sites (SNS) e.g., Facebook can act as accessible and effective tools for the prevention and treatment of PPD. In this paper, we analyze the opinions and awareness level of Bangladeshi people about PPD and impact of using SNS during postpartum period on reducing PPD based on our survey (N = 93). We also discuss possible SNS-based interventions and design implications that can effectively and feasibly reduce PPD in women in developing countries

Social media markers to identify fathers at risk of postpartum depression : a machine learning approach

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a significant mental health issue in mothers and fathers alike; yet at-risk fathers often come to the attention of health care professionals late due to low awareness of symptoms and reluctance to seek help. This study aimed to examine whether passive social media markers are effective for identifying fathers at risk of PPD. We collected 67,796 Reddit posts from 365 fathers, spanning a 6-month period around the birth of their child. A list of "at-risk"words was developed in collaboration with a perinatal mental health expert. PPD was assessed by evaluating the change in fathers' use of words indicating depressive symptomatology after childbirth. Predictive models were developed as a series of support vector machine classifiers using behavior, emotion, linguistic style, and discussion topics as features. The performance of these classifiers indicates that fathers at risk of PPD can be predicted from their prepartum data alone. Overall, the best performing model used discussion topic features only with a recall score of 0.82. These findings could assist in the development of support and intervention tools for fathers during the prepartum period, with specific applicability to personalized and preventative support tools for at-risk fathers. © Copyright 2020, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers 2020

Facts and Fabrications about Ebola: A Twitter Based Study

Microblogging websites like Twitter have been shown to be immensely useful for spreading information on a global scale within seconds. The detrimental effect, however, of such platforms is that misinformation and rumors are also as likely to spread on the network as credible, verified information. From a public health standpoint, the spread of misinformation creates unnecessary panic for the public. We recently witnessed several such scenarios during the outbreak of Ebola in 2014 [14, 1]. In order to effectively counter the medical misinformation in a timely manner, our goal here is to study the nature of such misinformation and rumors in the United States during fall 2014 when a handful of Ebola cases were confirmed in North America. It is a well known convention on Twitter to use hashtags to give context to a Twitter message (a tweet). In this study, we collected approximately 47M tweets from the Twitter streaming API related to Ebola. Based on hashtags, we propose a method to classify the tweets into two sets: credible and speculative. We analyze these two sets and study how they differ in terms of a number of features extracted from the Twitter API. In conclusion, we infer several interesting differences between the two sets. We outline further potential directions to using this material for monitoring and separating speculative tweets from credible ones, to enable improved public health information.Comment: Appears in SIGKDD BigCHat Workshop 201

BurnoutWords - Detecting Burnout for a Clinical Setting

Burnout, a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from major workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, is a major problem of today's society, in particular in crisis times such as a global pandemic situation. Burnout detection is hard, because the symptoms often overlap with other diseases and syndromes. Typical clinical approaches are using inventories to assess burnout for their patients, even though free-text approaches are considered promising. In research of natural language processing (NLP) applied to mental health, often data from social media is used and not real patient data, which leads to some limitations for the application in clinical use cases. In this paper, we fill the gap and provide a dataset using extracts from interviews with burnout patients containing 216 records. We train a support vector machine (SVM) classifier to detect burnout in text snippets with an accuracy of around 80%, which is clearly higher than the random baseline of our setup. This provides the foundation for a next generation of clinical methods based on NLP

Towards Using Word Embedding Vector Space for Better Cohort Analysis

On websites like Reddit, users join communities where they discuss specific topics which cluster them into possible cohorts. The authors within these cohorts have the opportunity to post more openly under the blanket of anonymity, and such openness provides a more accurate signal on the real issues individuals are facing. Some communities contain discussions about mental health struggles such as depression and suicidal ideation. To better understand and analyse these individuals, we propose to exploit properties of word embeddings that group related concepts close to each other in the embeddings space. For the posts from each topically situated sub-community, we build a word embeddings model and use handcrafted lexicons to identify emotions, values and psycholinguistically relevant concepts. We then extract insights into ways users perceive these concepts by measuring distances between them and references made by users either to themselves, others or other things around them. We show how our proposed approach can extract meaningful signals that go beyond the kinds of analyses performed at the individual word level