MIDAS: mental illness detection and analysis via social media

Abstract

Mental illnesses rank as some of the most disabling conditions, affecting millions of people, across the globe. In general, the main challenge of mental disorders is that they remain difficult to detect on suffering patients. In an online environment, the challenge extends to the collection of patients data and the implementation of proper algorithms to assist in the detection of such illnesses. In this paper, we propose a novel data collection mechanism and build predictive models that leverage language and behavioral patterns, used particularly on Twitter, to determine whether a user is suffering from a mental disorder. After training the predictive models, they are further pre-trained to serve as the back-end for our demonstration, MIDAS. MIDAS offers an analytics web-service to explore several characteristics pertaining to user's linguistic and behavioral patterns on social media, with respect to mental illnesses.