2020 ACL ACL 2020

Estimating the effect of COVID-19 on mental health: Linguistic indicators of depression during a global pandemic

Abstract

AbstractThis preliminary analysis uses a deep LSTM neural network with fastText embeddings to predict population rates of depression on Reddit in order to estimate the effect of COVID-19 on mental health. We find that year over year, depression rates on Reddit are up 50% , suggesting a 15-million person increase in the number of depressed Americans and a $7.5 billion increase in depression related spending. This finding suggests that utility in NLP approaches to longitudinal public-health surveillance.

🌉 Interdisciplinary Bridge — Deep Learning and Healthcare & Medicine and Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing
🐣 Hot Topic Early Bird — depression detection
🐝 Cross-Pollinator — Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Computer Vision, Data Science & Analytics, Deep Learning, Healthcare & Medicine, Interdisciplinary, Knowledge & Reasoning, Machine Learning, Mathematics & Optimization, Natural Language Processing, Reinforcement Learning, Robotics, Security & Privacy, Speech & Audio

Authors