Automatic Detection and Prediction of Psychiatric Hospitalizations From Social Media Posts

Zhengping Jiang, Jonathan Zomick, Sarah Ita Levitan, Mark Serper, Julia Hirschberg

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

We address the problem of predicting psychiatric hospitalizations using linguistic features drawn from social media posts. We formulate this novel task and develop an approach to automatically extract time spans of self-reported psychiatric hospitalizations. Using this dataset, we build predictive models of psychiatric hospitalization, comparing feature sets, user vs. post classification, and comparing model performance using a varying time window of posts. Our best model achieves an F1 of .718 using 7 days of posts. Our results suggest that this is a useful framework for collecting hospitalization data, and that social media data can be leveraged to predict acute psychiatric crises before they occur, potentially saving lives and improving outcomes for individuals with mental illness.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationComputational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology
Subtitle of host publicationImproving Access, CLPsych 2021 - Proceedings of the 7th Workshop, in conjunction with NAACL 2021
EditorsNazli Goharian, Philip Resnik, Andrew Yates, Molly Ireland, Kate Niederhoffer, Rebecca Resnik
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages116-121
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781954085411
StatePublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event7th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: Improving Access, CLPsych 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 11 Jun 2021 → …

Publication series

NameComputational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: Improving Access, CLPsych 2021 - Proceedings of the 7th Workshop, in conjunction with NAACL 2021

Conference

Conference7th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: Improving Access, CLPsych 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period11/06/21 → …

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