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. 2016 May:2016:2098-2110.
doi: 10.1145/2858036.2858207.

Discovering Shifts to Suicidal Ideation from Mental Health Content in Social Media

Munmun De Choudhury  1 , Emre Kiciman  2 , Mark Dredze  3 , Glen Coppersmith  4 , Mrinal Kumar  1
Affiliations

Discovering Shifts to Suicidal Ideation from Mental Health Content in Social Media

Munmun De Choudhury et al. Proc SIGCHI Conf Hum Factor Comput Syst. 2016 May.

Abstract

History of mental illness is a major factor behind suicide risk and ideation. However research efforts toward characterizing and forecasting this risk is limited due to the paucity of information regarding suicide ideation, exacerbated by the stigma of mental illness. This paper fills gaps in the literature by developing a statistical methodology to infer which individuals could undergo transitions from mental health discourse to suicidal ideation. We utilize semi-anonymous support communities on Reddit as unobtrusive data sources to infer the likelihood of these shifts. We develop language and interactional measures for this purpose, as well as a propensity score matching based statistical approach. Our approach allows us to derive distinct markers of shifts to suicidal ideation. These markers can be modeled in a prediction framework to identify individuals likely to engage in suicidal ideation in the future. We discuss societal and ethical implications of this research.

Keywords: H.4 Information Systems Applications; Miscellaneous; Reddit; mental health; social media; suicidal ideation.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Schematic diagram of obtaining MH → SW and MH classes of users.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The likelihood of posting to SW for people using and not using target words varies over strata. Note that the strata divisions for each target word occur at different estimated propensity scores, baes.
Figure 3
Figure 3
ROC curve in classification of MH → SW and MH users.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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