Identifying Depressive Symptoms from Tweets: Figurative Language Enabled Multitask Learning Framework

Existing studies on using social media for deriving mental health status of users focus on the depression detection task. However, for case management and referral to psychiatrists, healthcare workers require practical and scalable depressive disorder screening and triage system. This study aims to design and evaluate a decision support system (DSS) to reliably determine the depressive triage level by capturing fine-grained depressive symptoms expressed in user tweets through the emulation of Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) that is routinely used in clinical practice. The reliable detection of depressive symptoms from tweets is challenging because the 280-character limit on tweets incentivizes the use of creative artifacts in the utterances and figurative usage contributes to effective expression. We propose a novel BERT based robust multi-task learning framework to accurately identify the depressive symptoms using the auxiliary task of figurative usage detection. Specifically, our proposed novel task sharing mechanism, co-task aware attention, enables automatic selection of optimal information across the BERT layers and tasks by soft-sharing of parameters. Our results show that modeling figurative usage can demonstrably improve the model\u27s robustness and reliability for distinguishing the depression symptoms

The Psychology of Trauma and COVID-19

This is the third installment in the Shelter in Place (SiP) Lecture series. This installment deals with the impact and implications of the Shelter in Place order in terms of Psychological Trauma

The impact of endorsing Spitzer’s proposed criteria for PTSD in the forthcoming DSM-V on male and female Veterans

This study explored differences between Spitzer’s proposed model of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the current DSM-IV diagnostic classification scheme in 353 Veterans. The majority of Veterans (89%) diagnosed with PTSD as specified in the DSM-IV also met Spitzer’s proposed criteria. Veterans who met both DSM-IV and Spitzer’s proposed criteria had significantly higher Clinician Administered PTSD Scale severity scores than Veterans only meeting DSM-IV criteria. Logistic regression indicated that being African American and having no comorbid diagnosis of major depressive disorder or history of a substance use disorder were found to predict those Veterans who met current, but not proposed criteria. These findings have important implications regarding proposed changes to the diagnostic classification criteria for PTSD in the forthcoming DSM-V

Personalized Prediction of Suicide Risk for Web-based Intervention

Across the United States, suicide is the second leading cause of death for people aged between 15 and 34, and younger people are more prone to mental health problems, suicidal thoughts, and behaviors. For instance, 80% of patients with Borderline Personality Disorder have suicide-related behaviors, and between 4-9% of them commit suicide. Moreover, the social stigma associated with mental health issues and suicide deter patients from sharing their experiences directly with others. In such a situation, social media that provides a free and open forum for voluntary expression can provide insights into suicide ideation and self-destructive behavior. Reddit is a widely used and highly relevant social-media platform where users subscribe to specific subreddits and share their experiences. The users on the respective subreddits often make use of metaphoric suicidal language with related intentions, while interacting with other like-minded users sharing similar experiences. The Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS) has been employed by clinicians to measure the level of suicidal risk but has not been adequately personalized for improved prevention and resiliency. In this study, we develop a framework for the prediction of suicidal risk by conducting a user-level analysis supervised by C-SSRS and using medical knowledge bases. This will eventually facilitate a clinician to perform a personalized web-based intervention. Our two-fold approach creates a user-level decision-making mechanism that factors in the linguistic, temporal, homophily-based, metaphorical, and intent-based information from the dialogues of 93K users interacting on r/SuicideWatch and other related subreddits that aid in the characterization of users’ suicidal vulnerability

The Psychology of Trauma and COVID-19

This is the third installment in the Shelter in Place (SiP) Lecture series. This installment deals with the impact and implications of the Shelter in Place order in terms of Psychological Trauma

Brief Motivational Interview–Based Intervention for Women in Jail With History of Drug Addiction and Sex-Trading

Women admitted to jail with a substance use disorder who are trading sex for money or drugs represent a population at particularly high risk for severe addiction, mental and physical health comorbidities, and a multiplicity of psychosocial barriers to achieving recovery. Time in jail can be an opportunity to reach this subgroup of incarcerated women with a brief intervention focused on increasing motivation for change and assisting with postrelease planning. However, there is no research on the use of brief interventions for assisting this group of women with postrelease planning. The purpose of the current project was to test the feasibility of offering a brief motivational interviewing–based intervention adapted for use in the jail setting and designed to accommodate a wide variety of participant concerns. Participants were 91 incarcerated women who volunteered to participate in the 2-appointment intervention. Participants demonstrated a high prevalence of severe drug addiction (73%), major depression (54%), and posttraumatic stress disorder (66%) based on screening measures. Participants also endorsed the need for help with a number of other top-ranked concerns involving housing, employment, custody of children, and education. Participants showed a significant decrease in average number of arrests in the 12-month period after receiving the intervention compared to the 12-month period prior. These findings suggest that a brief motivational interviewing–based intervention may be feasible for assisting women who are in jail with postrelease planning related to their psychosocial and mental health needs. Additional research will be required to determine if the intervention improves on outcomes compared to usual jail procedures

Brief Motivational Interview–Based Intervention for Women in Jail With History of Drug Addiction and Sex-Trading

Women admitted to jail with a substance use disorder who are trading sex for money or drugs represent a population at particularly high risk for severe addiction, mental and physical health comorbidities, and a multiplicity of psychosocial barriers to achieving recovery. Time in jail can be an opportunity to reach this subgroup of incarcerated women with a brief intervention focused on increasing motivation for change and assisting with postrelease planning. However, there is no research on the use of brief interventions for assisting this group of women with postrelease planning. The purpose of the current project was to test the feasibility of offering a brief motivational interviewing–based intervention adapted for use in the jail setting and designed to accommodate a wide variety of participant concerns. Participants were 91 incarcerated women who volunteered to participate in the 2-appointment intervention. Participants demonstrated a high prevalence of severe drug addiction (73%), major depression (54%), and posttraumatic stress disorder (66%) based on screening measures. Participants also endorsed the need for help with a number of other top-ranked concerns involving housing, employment, custody of children, and education. Participants showed a significant decrease in average number of arrests in the 12-month period after receiving the intervention compared to the 12-month period prior. These findings suggest that a brief motivational interviewing–based intervention may be feasible for assisting women who are in jail with postrelease planning related to their psychosocial and mental health needs. Additional research will be required to determine if the intervention improves on outcomes compared to usual jail procedures