Schizophrenia more employable than depression? Language-based artificial intelligence model ratings for employability of psychiatric diagnoses and somatic and healthy controls

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) assists recruiting and job searching. Such systems can be biased against certain characteristics. This results in potential misrepresentations and consequent inequalities related to people with mental health disorders. Hence occupational and mental health bias in existing Natural Language Processing (NLP) models used in recruiting and job hunting must be assessed. We examined occupational bias against mental health disorders in NLP models through relationships between occupations, employability, and psychiatric diagnoses. We investigated Word2Vec and GloVe embedding algorithms through analogy questions and graphical representation of cosine similarities. Word2Vec embeddings exhibit minor bias against mental health disorders when asked analogies regarding employability attributes and no evidence of bias when asked analogies regarding high earning jobs. GloVe embeddings view common mental health disorders such as depression less healthy and less employable than severe mental health disorders and most physical health conditions. Overall, physical, and psychiatric disorders are seen as similarly healthy and employable. Both algorithms appear to be safe for use in downstream task without major repercussions. Further research is needed to confirm this. This project was funded by the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Programme (LISS-DTP). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Fig 1. 300 dimensions GloVe word vectors.

Vectors of words ‘employable’ and ‘unemployable’ as poles on the Y axis. The X axis contains words ‘ill’ and ‘healthy’. Psychiatric diagnoses (green) physical diagnoses (blue) and favourable physical attribute control terms (red) as well as very healthy control terms (yellow). This examines how different psychiatric labels correspond to concepts of employability and health.

Fig 2. 300 dimensions GloVe word vectors.

Vectors of words ‘reliable’ and ‘unreliable’ as poles on the Y axis. The X axis words ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’. Psychiatric diagnoses (green) physical diagnoses (blue) and favourable physical attribute control terms (red) as well as very healthy control terms (yellow). This examines how different labels vary in the relationship to the concepts of ‘unemployable’ and ‘healthy’.