Predicting future mental illness from social media: A big-data approach

In the present research, we investigated whether people’s everyday language contains sufficient signal to predict the future occurrence of mental illness. Language samples were collected from the social media website Reddit, drawing on posts to discussion groups focusing on different kinds of mental illness (clinical subreddits), as well as on posts to discussion groups focusing on nonmental health topics (nonclinical subreddits). As expected, words drawn from the clinical subreddits could be used to distinguish several kinds of mental illness (ADHD, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and depression). Interestingly, words drawn from the nonclinical subreddits (e.g., travel, cooking, cars) could also be used to distinguish different categories of mental illness, implying that the impact of mental illness spills over into topics unrelated to mental illness. Most importantly, words derived from the nonclinical subreddits predicted future postings to clinical subreddits, implying that everyday language contains signal about the likelihood of future mental illness, possibly before people are aware of their mental health condition. Finally, whereas models trained on clinical subreddits learned to focus on words indicating disorder-specific symptoms, models trained to predict future mental illness learned to focus on words indicating life stress, suggesting that kinds of features that are predictive of mental illness may change over time. Implications for the underlying causes of mental illness are discussed.