DepressMind: A Depression Surveillance System for Social Media Analysis

Depression is a pressing global issue that impacts millions of individuals worldwide. This prevailing psychological disorder profoundly influences the thoughts and behavior of those who suffer from it. We have developed DepressMind\footnote{A demonstration video of DepressMind is available at: \url{https://youtu.be/rd6ZVWbxYrM}}, a versatile screening tool designed to facilitate the analysis of social network data. This automated tool explores multiple psychological dimensions associated with clinical depression and estimates the extent to which these symptoms manifest in language use. Our project comprises two distinct components: one for data extraction and another one for analysis. The data extraction phase is dedicated to harvesting texts and the associated meta-information from social networks and transforming them into a user-friendly format that serves various analytical purposes. For the analysis, the main objective is to conduct an in-depth inspection of the user publications and establish connections between the posted contents and dimensions or traits defined by well-established clinical instruments. Specifically, we aim to associate extracts authored by individuals with symptoms or dimensions of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI).

keywords: Social media, Computational Intelligence, eRisk, Mental Health, Social Media Monitoring