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AI model detects mental disorders based on web posts
https://techxplore.com ^ | March 2,2022 | by Harini Barath, Dartmouth College

Posted on 03/03/2022 12:38:48 PM PST by Red Badger

Dartmouth researchers have built an artificial intelligence model for detecting mental disorders using conversations on Reddit, part of an emerging wave of screening tools that use computers to analyze social media posts and gain an insight into people's mental states.

What sets the new model apart is a focus on the emotions rather than the specific content of the social media texts being analyzed. In a paper presented at the 20th International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, the researchers show that this approach performs better over time, irrespective of the topics discussed in the posts.

There are many reasons why people don't seek help for mental health disorders—stigma, high costs, and lack of access to services are some common barriers. There is also a tendency to minimize signs of mental disorders or conflate them with stress, says Xiaobo Guo, Guarini '24, a co-author of the paper. It's possible that they will seek help with some prompting, he says, and that's where digital screening tools can make a difference.

"Social media offers an easy way to tap into people's behaviors," says Guo. The data is voluntary and public, published for others to read, he says.

Reddit, which offers a massive network of user forums, was their platform of choice because it has nearly half a billion active users who discuss a wide range of topics. The posts and comments are publicly available, and the researchers could collect data dating back to 2011.

In their study, the researchers focused on what they call emotional disorders—major depressive, anxiety, and bipolar disorders—which are characterized by distinct emotional patterns. They looked at data from users who had self-reported as having one of these disorders and from users without any known mental disorders.

They trained their model to label the emotions expressed in users' posts and map the emotional transitions between different posts, so a post could be labeled "joy," "anger," "sadness," "fear," "no emotion," or a combination of these. The map is a matrix that would show how likely it was that a user went from any one state to another, such as from anger to a neutral state of no emotion.

Different emotional disorders have their own signature patterns of emotional transitions. By creating an emotional "fingerprint" for a user and comparing it to established signatures of emotional disorders, the model can detect them. To validate their results, they tested it on posts that were not used during training and show that the model accurately predicts which users may or may not have one of these disorders.

This approach sidesteps an important problem called "information leakage" that typical screening tools run into, says Soroush Vosoughi, assistant professor of computer science and another co-author. Other models are built around scrutinizing and relying on the content of the text, he says, and while the models show high performance, they can also be misleading.

For instance, if a model learns to correlate "COVID" with "sadness" or "anxiety," Vosoughi explains, it will naturally assume that a scientist studying and posting (quite dispassionately) about COVID-19 is suffering from depression or anxiety. On the other hand, the new model only zeroes in on the emotion and learns nothing about the particular topic or event described in the posts.

While the researchers don't look at intervention strategies, they hope this work can point the way to prevention. In their paper, they make a strong case for more thoughtful scrutiny of models based on social media data. "It's very important to have models that perform well," says Vosoughi, "but also really understand their working, biases, and limitations."

Explore further

Can emoji use be the key in detecting remote-work burnout?

More information:

Xiaobo Guo, Yaojia Sun, Soroush Vosoughi, Emotion-based Modeling of Mental Disorders on Social Media. arXiv:2201.09451v1 [cs.SI], arxiv.org/pdf/2201.09451.pdf


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Computers/Internet; Conspiracy; Society
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To: Red Badger
Omecay nday etgay emay!

-Jpay

61 posted on 03/03/2022 1:37:19 PM PST by Political Junkie Too ( * LAAP = Left-wing Activist Agitprop Press (formerly known as the MSM))
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To: Red Badger

Send it over to DU....the AI will have a breakdown and need therapy....


62 posted on 03/03/2022 1:37:52 PM PST by nevergore (I have a terrible rash on my covfefe....)
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To: A Navy Vet

Consciousness. Conscience is knowing the difference between right and wrong.


63 posted on 03/03/2022 1:39:50 PM PST by webheart (I thought I was helping by getting vaccinated but they say I didn’t help at all. )
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To: pfflier

“It is not the software doing the evaluating, it is the bias of the code writer.”

That’s not how self-learning AI networks work. What you are claiming pertains to classic deterministic code.


64 posted on 03/03/2022 1:39:57 PM PST by steve86 (Prophecies of Maelmhaedhoc O'Morgair (Latin form: Malachy))
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To: Red Badger

Huh... I would have expected that AI servers to explode the second it accessed Reddit.


65 posted on 03/03/2022 1:40:08 PM PST by Intar
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To: Red Badger; All

START TYPING IN ALL CAPS AND USE A LOT OF !!!! IN YOUR POSTS!!!

THEY WON’T BOTHER WITH YOU, THEN!!! :)


66 posted on 03/03/2022 1:40:21 PM PST by Diana in Wisconsin (I don't have, 'Hobbies.' I'm developing a robust Post-Apocalyptic skill set. )
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To: Red Badger

There is no such thing as Artificial Intelligence. It is entirely theoretical at this point. What we are told is Artificial Intelligence is actually a bunch of nested algorithms and relational databases. There may be someday but we are a long long way off from there.


67 posted on 03/03/2022 1:43:58 PM PST by webheart (I thought I was helping by getting vaccinated but they say I didn’t help at all. )
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To: Red Badger
Communists have always used the claim of “mental illness” to imprison their ideological enemies.
Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union

There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union,[1] based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem.[2] It was called “psychopathological mechanisms” of dissent.[3]

During the leadership of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, psychiatry was used to disable and remove from society political opponents (”dissidents”) who openly expressed beliefs that contradicted the official dogma.[4][5] The term “philosophical intoxication”, for instance, was widely applied to the mental disorders diagnosed when people disagreed with the country's Communist leaders and, by referring to the writings of the Founding Fathers of Marxism–Leninism—Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin—made them the target of criticism.[6]

Article 58-10 of the Stalin-era Criminal Code, “Anti-Soviet agitation”, was to a considerable degree preserved in the new 1958 RSFSR Criminal Code as Article 70 “Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”. In 1967, a weaker law, Article 190-1 “Dissemination of fabrications known to be false, which defame the Soviet political and social system”, was added to the RSFSR Criminal Code. These laws were frequently applied in conjunction with the system of diagnosis for mental illness, developed by academician Andrei Snezhnevsky. Together, they established a framework within which non-standard beliefs could easily be defined as a criminal offence and the basis, subsequently, for a psychiatric diagnosis.[7]

Source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union

America is sliding into the pit of totalitarianism and a lot of idiots on this forum want to go fight an overseas war to against Russia a nuclear power.

I'm starting to wonder if this isn't just part of the overall depopulation plan because radiation works as well as the clot-shots to kill billions

68 posted on 03/03/2022 1:47:27 PM PST by WMarshal ("No war for communism")
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To: Red Badger

Instead of them going after real threats, such as tens of millions of illegals from God knows where pouring in, they once again are targeting legitimate citizens.


69 posted on 03/03/2022 2:00:12 PM PST by dragnet2 (Diversion and evasion are tools of deceit)
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To: Red Badger

I’m rubbing my knuckles and sucking my teeth while posting.
Just thought AI should know.


70 posted on 03/03/2022 2:10:28 PM PST by outofsalt (If history teaches us anything, it's that history rarely teaches anything.)
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To: rrrod

They will have to give up their computers and laptops, not just to avoid a diagnosis but because Google’s new toy Soli that uses radar electromagnetic waves to pick up exact movements and gestures. To make life simpler, they claim. It will know you’re coming and fire up all your notifications and pages before you even sit in you chair.


71 posted on 03/03/2022 2:17:36 PM PST by M_Continuum
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To: Red Badger

Let’s save them the trouble. Just ask “Are you or have you ever been a FReeper or ever visited freerepublic.com?” and you’ll find all of us mental defectives in jig time.


72 posted on 03/03/2022 2:18:14 PM PST by ProtectOurFreedom (If truckers quit their jobs, society would collapse. If politicians quit their jobs...HALLELUJAH!)
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To: Red Badger

Glop - goople - nuclear - candy - horse - milk - bars

I am NOT crazy!

So all of you SHUT UP!


73 posted on 03/03/2022 2:19:07 PM PST by Fury
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To: bgill

From what little I’ve been on Reddit, I don’t see how you could train an AI from there. Everyone on there seems to have one or more mental disorders. Where would be the “normal” for the training set?


74 posted on 03/03/2022 2:19:34 PM PST by ThunderSleeps (Vaccine mandates: they are not about health, they are about obedience.)
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To: fluorescence

:)


75 posted on 03/03/2022 2:36:17 PM PST by kanawa ((Securing the 2022/2024 elections is of paramount importance.))
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To: Red Badger

Is the what a singularity is?


76 posted on 03/03/2022 2:51:42 PM PST by Clutch Martin (The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.)
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To: Red Badger

AI programmed by who detects mental illness on exactly what type of posts? Posts that don’t support or are critical of our would be socialist masters?


77 posted on 03/03/2022 3:23:21 PM PST by Mastador1
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To: Red Badger

AI cannot possibly understand context, so don’t believe it can detect mental illness. It has simply been programmed to look for phrases conservative use.


78 posted on 03/03/2022 3:29:22 PM PST by CodeToad (Arm up! They Have!)
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To: bgill

We’re all in DEEP trouble!🥸


79 posted on 03/03/2022 4:18:57 PM PST by 6ppc (Democrats would have to climb Everest to reach the level of "scum of the earth")
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To: Georgia Girl 2

“Who tells AI what comments are mental?”

Lol... Someone who has no clue... :)


80 posted on 03/03/2022 4:19:26 PM PST by Openurmind (The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children. ~ D. Bonhoeffer)
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