Detecting depression and its severity based on social media digital cues
Industrial Management & Data Systems
ISSN: 0263-5577
Article publication date: 29 September 2023
Issue publication date: 4 December 2023
Abstract
Purpose
As convenience and anonymity, people with mental illness are increasingly willing to communicate and share information through social media platforms to receive emotional and spiritual support. The purpose of this paper is to identify the degree of depression based on people's behavioral patterns and discussion content on the Internet.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on the previous studies on depression, the severity of depression is divided into four categories: no significant depressive symptoms, mild MDD, moderate MDD and severe MDD, and defined each of them. Next, in order to automatically identify the severity, the authors proposed social media digital cues to identify the severity of depression, which include textual lexical features, depressive language features and social behavioral features. Finally, the authors evaluate a system that is developed based on social media digital cues in the experiment using social media data.
Findings
The social media digital cues including textual lexical features, depressive language features and social behavioral features (F1, F2 and F3) is the relatively best one to classify four different levels of depression.
Originality/value
This paper innovatively proposes a social media data-based framework (SMDF) to identify and predict different degrees of depression through social media digital cues and evaluates the accuracy of the detection through social media data, providing useful attempts for the identification and intervention of depression.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Funding: The authors are grateful for the helpful input of the editor, associate editor, and reviewers. In addition, the authors acknowledge support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72071131).
Citation
Deng, S., Cheng, X. and Hu, R. (2023), "Detecting depression and its severity based on social media digital cues", Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 123 No. 12, pp. 3038-3052. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-12-2022-0754
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited