Twitter Can Track Mental Illness

According to an article in the “Nevada Daily Situation Report”, Johns Hopkins University (JHU) www.jhu.edu computer scientists are using Twitter posts to track flu cases. They say their techniques show promise for using Twitter as a tool to gather important information on some common mental illnesses.

By reviewing tweets from users who publicly mentioned their diagnosis and by looking for language cues linked to certain disorders, the researchers have been able to quickly and inexpensively collect new data on PTSD, depression, bipolar disorder, and seasonal affective disorder.

In research presented at three scientific conferences this year, the researchers described how their techniques for mining public data has yielded fresh numbers on cases of these illnesses that were previously difficult or too expensive to obtain. The researchers emphasized that their findings did not disclose the names of people who publicly tweeted about their disorders.

The goal is to share timely additional information on the prevalence of certain mental illnesses with treatment providers and public health officials. By using computer technology to sift through tweets, this research effort can help to address the slow pace and high costs associated with collecting mental health data through surveys and other traditional methods.

According to Glen Coppersmith, a Johns Hopkins Senior Research Scientist playing a key role in the project, “We’re not aiming to replace the long standing survey methods used to track mental illness trends, but we believe our new techniques could complement that process. We’re trying to show that analyzing tweets could uncover similar results, but could do it more quickly and at a much lower cost.”

In August, at a meeting in Boston, Coppersmith and colleagues talked about their promising early results in a study using Twitter posts to study mental illness in specific geographic areas.

The information collected demonstrates that Twitter Posts could become a useful yardstick in quickly measuring mental health trends, particularly after dramatic events such as natural disasters and military conflicts.

“Using Twitter to find mental health cases could be very helpful to health practitioners and government officials who need to decide where counseling and other care is needed most”, reports Mark Dredze, Assistant Research Professor in the JHU Whiting School of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science www.cs.jhu.edu. “It could point to places where many veterans may be experiencing PTSD or point to towns where people have been traumatized by a shooting spree, or widespread damage.”

The December 16, 2014 Daily Situation Report article ESF 8-1-Mental Health Services http://dem.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/demnvgov/content/Resources/Daily/SituationReport%281%29.pdf.