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TABLE OF CONTENT

S.NO. CONTENT PAGE No.

1. Introduction 2-3

2. Literature Review 4-5

3. Objective 6

4. Methodology 7

5. References 8

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 INTRODUCTION

Depression is a common but serious mental health disorder. Still, most people dealing with depression
do not approach doctors for this problem. On the other hand, the use of Social Media Sites like Twitter
is expanding extremely fast. Nowadays, people tend to rely on these social media platforms to share
their emotions and feelings through their feed. Thus, this readily available content on social media has
become helpful for us to analyze the mental health of such users. We can apply various machine
learning techniques on this social media data to extract the mental health status of a user focusing on
Depression. Detecting texts that express negativity in the data is one of the best ways to detect
depression. In this paper, we highlighted this problem of depression and discussed various techniques
on how to detect it. we implemented a system that can detect if a person on social media is going
through depression or not by analyzing the user’s data and activities by using various machine learning
techniques.

Depression is a dysfunctional behavior that can influence anybody regardless of old enough, gender,
status, and so forth. It extremely brunt a person’s life affecting what they think about themself, their
sleeping cycle, eating cycle, etc. It is the worst state of a person's mind when they feel sad and loses
interest in nearly doing every productive thing and they can’t simply move from that state. Factors like
Social, Biological and psychological factors are responsible for causing depression.

Project Field and Technology Used:

The field of this project is primarily focused on mental health detection using social media data,
which is an emerging area in digital psychiatry and artificial intelligence. The use of social media for
mental health monitoring has gained significant traction due to the large amount of publicly available
data and the ability to track real-time behavioral patterns. Social media platforms like Reddit, Twitter,
and Facebook are increasingly seen as valuable resources for early mental health detection.
To develop this project, the following technologies and tools will be used:

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 1. APIs for Social Media Platforms:

 Twitter API, Reddit API, Instagram Graph API, etc., for extracting posts and user data.
 Libraries like Tweepy (for Twitter), PRAW (for Reddit), or custom scraping scripts using
BeautifulSoup or Selenium for data gathering.
2. Python:
 NLTK, spaCy, or TextBlob for tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, and stop-word
removal.
 re and emoji libraries for cleaning and handling non-standard text (like emojis, hashtags,
etc.).
 Pandas and NumPy for data cleaning and manipulation.
3. Vectorization Techniques:
 TF-IDF, Count Vectorizer, or pre-trained word embeddings like Word2Vec, GloVe, or fast
Text
 Transformers library for contextual embeddings (e.g., using BERT or RoBERTa).

Special Technical Terms:

 Sentiment Analysis: Sentiment analysis is a technique used to analyze and determine the
emotional tone behind a body of text. It categorizes text into positive, negative, or neutral
sentiments. This will help identify users experiencing negative emotions, which may signal
mental health concerns.
 Natural Language Processing (NLP): NLP is a subfield of AI that focuses on enabling
machines to process and understand human language. Techniques like tokenization, named
entity recognition (NER), and dependency parsing will be used to analyse Reddit posts.
 Reddit API: The Reddit API allows developers to access Reddit's data, including user posts,
comments, and metadata. It provides an essential way to collect large-scale data from the
platform.
The primary goal of this project is to develop a framework that can detect potential signs of mental
disorders through the analysis of publicly available social media data, offering an accessible, non-

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invasive, and scalable method for early detection.

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 Literature Review

 Importance of Depression Detection: Depression is a global mental health concern, affecting

over 280 million people annually (WHO, 2021). Early detection and intervention can
significantly improve outcomes. Social media provides an accessible medium for analyzing
self-expressed emotions, making it a valuable tool for mental health research.

 Data Collection and Preprocessing: Researchers predominantly use platforms like Twitter,
Reddit, and Facebook due to their text-rich content and public availability and employed
Twitter API and Reddit datasets to extract text data indicative of depressive symptoms.

 Challenges: Noise in data, including slang, abbreviations, and mixed languages, complicates
preprocessing. Techniques like stop-word removal, stemming, and lemmatization are widely
applied [3].

 Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Social Media Analysis: Natural language processing
has emerged as a powerful tool for mental health detection. NLP techniques such as sentiment
analysis, keyword extraction, and topic modelling have been widely applied to social media
data. In their work, Guntuku et al. (2017) used sentiment analysis to detect depression on
Reddit, demonstrating how specific word usage and posting patterns could serve as indicators of
mental health conditions. The application of topic modelling was also explored by De
Choudhury et al. (2013), who studied the presence of specific topics related to mental health
and their correlation with psychological distress.

 Machine Learning and Social Media Data: Machine learning has been widely integrated into
social media analysis, with supervised learning algorithms such as support vector machines
(SVM) and random forests being employed to classify and predict mental health outcomes
based on social media posts. Coppersmith et al. (2015) applied machine learning to predict
depression from Twitter data, training classifiers on user-generated text to detect depressive
symptoms.
Similarly, Huang et al. (2017) used machine learning to detect changes in user
behavior patterns on social media, proving that machine learning models can identify shifts in
online behavior indicative of mental health issues.

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 The reviewed literature supports the feasibility of using social media data for mental health
detection, especially for large platforms like Reddit, which allow for anonymous, frequent user
interactions that could reveal early signs of distress. These studies demonstrate the potential of
social media as a tool for real-time monitoring of mental health, which this project aims to build
upon using the Reddit API and AI techniques.

Fig 1. Sentiment Analysis graph

The Sentiment Analysis graph showing the emotional tone over time based on the sample data. The x-
axis represents the dates, while the y-axis represents the sentiment polarity. Positive values indicate
positive sentiment, negative values indicate negative sentiment, and values close to zero indicate
neutral sentiment.

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 OBJECTIVE

 Data Collection: Use the Reddit API to collect user-generated content, including posts and
comments from relevant subreddits.

 Feature Extraction: Apply natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract key
features, such as sentiment, keyword usage, and emotional tone, from the text.

 Sentiment Analysis: Conduct sentiment analysis to determine the emotional tone of the posts
and identify signs of negative mental health.

 Behavioral Analysis: Track user activity patterns such as post frequency and engagement to
identify potential indicators of mental health issues.

 Model Development: Develop AI-based models to classify user-generated content as indicative

or non-indicative of mental health issues.

 Validation and Testing: Validate the developed models with real-world data to assess their
accuracy and reliability in detecting mental health conditions.

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 METHODOLOGY

Data Collection: Use the Reddit API to extract publicly available posts and comments from relevant
subreddits related to mental health topics. The data will include text-based content and metadata,
such as post frequency and engagement metrics.

Data Preprocessing: Clean and preprocess the data by removing noise, such as irrelevant content and
stop words. This will ensure that only meaningful text data is analyzed.

Feature Extraction: Apply natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract relevant features,
including sentiment scores, emotional tone, and keyword frequency.

Sentiment and Behavioral Analysis: Perform sentiment analysis using AI-based models to detect
signs of depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions. Behavioral patterns, such as
posting frequency, will be analyzed to detect potential signs of mental distress.

Model Development: Use machine learning algorithms to classify posts as indicative or non-
indicative of mental health disorders based on the extracted features.

Evaluation and Testing: Test the model using a validation set to assess its performance. Metrics such
as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score will be used to evaluate the model's effectiveness.

Results Presentation: Present the results of the analysis through visualizations and reports,
highlighting key findings and insights about mental health trends on Reddit.

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 REFERENCES

1) Guntuku, S. C., et al. (2017). "Detecting Depression and Mental Illness on Social
Media: Analyzing Reddit Posts." Proceedings of the International Conference on
Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA).

2) Choudhury, M. D., et al. (2013). "Mental Health on the Web: The Case for Online
Monitoring." Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social
Media (ICWSM).
3) Zhang, L., et al. (2018). "Understanding Mental Health through Social Media: A
Case Study on Depression." Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE International
Conference on Big Data (Bigdata).
4) IEEE Citation Style Guide. IEEE Standard for Citation of References.

5) Reece, A. G., et al. (2017). "Predicting Mental Health from Social Media Posts."
Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
ACM.