"Let Me Tell You About Your Mental Health!": Contextualized Classification of Reddit Posts to DSM-5 for Web-based Intervention

By Manas Gaur, Ugur Kursuncu, Amanuel Alambo, Amit P. Sheth, Raminta Daniulaityte, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Jyotishman Pathak. 2018

112 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social media platforms are increasingly being used to share and seek advice on mental health issues. In particular, Reddit users freely discuss such issues on various subreddits, whose structure and content can be leveraged to formally interpret and relate subreddits and their posts in terms of mental health diagnostic categories. There is prior research on the extraction of mental health-related information, including symptoms, diagnosis, and treatments from social media; however, our approach can additionally provide actionable information to clinicians about the mental health of a patient in diagnostic terms for web-based intervention. Specifically, we provide a detailed analysis of the nature of subreddit content from domain expert's perspective and introduce a novel approach to map each subreddit to the best matching DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - 5th Edition) category using multi-class classifier. Our classification algorithm analyzes all the posts of a subreddit by adapting topic modeling and word-embedding techniques, and utilizing curated medical knowledge bases to quantify relationship to DSM-5 categories. Our semantic encoding-decoding optimization approach reduces the false-alarm-rate from 30% to 2.5% over a comparable heuristic baseline, and our mapping results have been verified by domain experts achieving a kappa score of 0.84.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Knowledge Infused Learning (K-IL): Towards Deep Incorporation of Knowledge in Deep Learning (2019, methodology): “Equation 5 is solvable using Sylvester optimization and its derivation is defined in a recent study (Gaur et al. 2018).”
Knowledge-aware Assessment of Severity of Suicide Risk for Early Intervention (2019, methodology): “(2) Using domain-specific resources- SNOMED-CT, DataMed, Drug Abuse Ontology (which incorporates DSM-5 [60]) and ICD-10, we created suicide risk severity lexicon, curated by MHPs.”
A Social Media Study on the Effects of Psychiatric Medication Use (2019, background): “Recent research has studied the abuse of prescription drugs, by leveraging drug forums (MacLean et al. 2015), Twitter (Sarker et al. 2015), and Reddit (Gaur et al. 2018).”
Modeling Islamist Extremist Communications on Social Media using Contextual Dimensions (2019, result): “n precision, recall and F1-score of 0.04, 0.04 and 0.03, respectively. In contrast to this literature, our work is grounded in the social science literature and incorporates domain-specific resources [30, 31, 52] in the model to better understand and detect extremist content usinglinguisticapproache”