scholarly journals Quantifying Suicidal Ideation on Social Media using Machine Learning: A Critical Review

2021 ◽  
pp. 4092-4100
Author(s):  
Syed Tanzeel Rabani ◽  
Qamar Rayees Khan ◽  
Akib Mohi Ud Din Khanday

Suicidal ideation is one of the severe mental health issues and a serious social problem faced by our society. This problem has been usually dealt with through the psychological point of view, using clinical face to face settings. There are various risk factors associated with suicides, including social isolation, anxiety, depression, etc., that decrease the threshold for suicide. The COVID-19 pandemic further increases social isolation, posing a great threat to the human population. Posting suicidal thoughts on social media is gaining much attention due to the social stigma associated with the mental health. Online Social Networks (OSN) are increasingly used to express the suicidal thoughts. Recently, a top Indian actor industry took the harsh step of suicide. The last Instagram posts revealed signs of depression, which if anticipated could have saved the precious life. Recent research indicated that the public information on social media provides valuable insights on detecting the users with the suicidal ideation. The motive of this study is to provide a systematic review of the work done already in the use of social media for suicide prevention and propose a novel classification approach that classifies the suicide related tweets/ posts into three levels of distress. Moreover, our proposed classification task which was implemented through various machine learning techniques revealed high accuracy in classifying the suicidal posts. Among all algorithms, the best performing algorithm was that of the decision tree, with an F1 score ranging 0.95-0.97. After thoroughly studying the work achieved by different researchers in the area of suicide prevention, our study critically analyses those works and finds various research gaps and solves some of them. We believe that our work will motivate research community to look into other gaps that will in turn help psychiatrists, psychologists, and counsellors to protect individuals suffering from suicidal ideation.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
U.S. Tambe ◽  
N.R. Kakad ◽  
S.J. Suryawanshi ◽  
S.S. Bhamre

To build a social network or social relations between people, we use social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, apps, etc. Using this media, users can share their views and opinions about a particular thing. Many people use their media for personal interests, entertainment, the market stocks, or business purposes. Nowadays, user security is the major concern for social networking sites. Online social networks give a little bit of support regarding content filtering. In this article, we proposed a system that provides security regarding malicious content that is posted on their social networking sites. To filter the content that might be unwanted messages, labeled images, or vulgar images, we proposed three level architecture. The user can use the auto-blocking facility as well.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 621-621
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Necka

Abstract The Geriatrics and Aging Processes Research Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) supports research on the etiology, pathophysiology, and trajectory of late life mental disorders. The branch encourages research using neuroscience, cognitive and affective science, and social and behavioral science to translate basic and preclinical research to clinical research. The branch prioritizes research that investigates neuropsychiatric disorders of aging, how they interact with neurodevelopment/neurodegeneration, and how to assess, treat, and prevent them. Of particular interest is research on social isolation and suicide. Suicide prevention research is an urgent priority: NIMH’s portfolio includes projects aimed at identifying those at risk for suicide, understanding causes of suicide risk, developing suicide prevention interventions, and testing the effectiveness of these interventions and services in real-world settings. In this talk, a NIMH program official will discuss the NIMH research agenda in the domain of late-life mental illness, social isolation, and suicide.


2021 ◽  
Vol 179 ◽  
pp. 821-828
Author(s):  
Andry Chowanda ◽  
Rhio Sutoyo ◽  
Meiliana ◽  
Sansiri Tanachutiwat

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
C S Pavan Kumar ◽  
L D Dhinesh Babu

Sentiment analysis is widely used to retrieve the hidden sentiments in medical discussions over Online Social Networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. People often tend to convey their feelings concerning their medical problems over social media platforms. Practitioners and health care workers have started to observe these discussions to assess the impact of health-related issues among the people. This helps in providing better care to improve the quality of life. Dementia is a serious disease in western countries like the United States of America and the United Kingdom, and the respective governments are providing facilities to the affected people. There is much chatter over social media platforms concerning the patients’ care, healthy measures to be followed to avoid disease, check early indications. These chatters have to be carefully monitored to help the officials take necessary precautions for the betterment of the affected. A novel Feature engineering architecture that involves feature-split for sentiment analysis of medical chatter over online social networks with the pipeline is proposed that can be used on any Machine Learning model. The proposed model used the fuzzy membership function in refining the outputs. The machine learning model has obtained sentiment score is subjected to fuzzification and defuzzification by using the trapezoid membership function and center of sums method, respectively. Three datasets are considered for comparison of the proposed and the regular model. The proposed approach delivered better results than the normal approach and is proved to be an effective approach for sentiment analysis of medical discussions over online social networks.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allie Slemon ◽  
Corey McAuliffe ◽  
Trevor Goodyear ◽  
Liza McGuinness ◽  
Elizabeth Shaffer ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic is having considerable impacts on population-level mental health, with research illustrating an increased prevalence in suicidal thoughts due to pandemic stressors. While the drivers of suicidal thoughts amid the pandemic are poorly understood, qualitative research holds great potential for expanding upon projections from pre-pandemic work and contextualizing emerging epidemiological data. Despite calls for qualitative inquiry, there is a paucity of qualitative research examining experiences of suicidality related to COVID-19. The use of publicly available data from social media offers timely and pertinent information into ongoing pandemic-related mental health, including individual experiences of suicidal thoughts. OBJECTIVE The objective of this paper is to examine online posts that discuss suicidal thoughts within one Reddit community r/COVID19_support with the aim to identify contributing stressors and coping strategies related to the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS This study draws on online posts from within the Reddit community r/COVID19_support that describe users’ suicidal thoughts during and related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected from creation of this subreddit on February 12, 2020 until December 31, 2020. Using the search term “suicide”, we used the NCapture add-on tool, hosted by NVivo, to conduct our investigation. A qualitative thematic analysis, as described by Braun and Clarke, was conducted to generate themes reflecting users’ experiences of suicidal thoughts. RESULTS A total of 83 posts from 57 users were included in the analysis. Reddit posts described a range of users’ lived experiences of suicidal thoughts related to the pandemic, including deterioration in mental health, complex emotions associated with suicidal thinking, and concern that suicidal thoughts may progress to action. Seven prominent and compounding stressors were identified as contributing to Reddit users’ suicidal thoughts, including social isolation, employment and finances, virus exposure and COVID-19 illness, uncertain timeline of the pandemic, news and social media, pre-existing mental health conditions, and lack of access to mental health resources. Some users described individual coping strategies used in attempt to manage suicidal thoughts, however these were recognized as insufficient for addressing the multilevel stressors of the pandemic. CONCLUSIONS Multiple and intersecting stressors have contributed to individuals’ experiences of suicidal thoughts in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring thoughtful and complex public health and policy responses. While ongoing challenges exist with self-disclosure of mental health challenges on social media, Reddit and other online platforms may a supportive space for users to share suicidal thoughts and discuss potential coping strategies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 569-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sujata Rani ◽  
Parteek Kumar

Abstract In this article, an innovative approach to perform the sentiment analysis (SA) has been presented. The proposed system handles the issues of Romanized or abbreviated text and spelling variations in the text to perform the sentiment analysis. The training data set of 3,000 movie reviews and tweets has been manually labeled by native speakers of Hindi in three classes, i.e. positive, negative, and neutral. The system uses WEKA (Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis) tool to convert these string data into numerical matrices and applies three machine learning techniques, i.e. Naive Bayes (NB), J48, and support vector machine (SVM). The proposed system has been tested on 100 movie reviews and tweets, and it has been observed that SVM has performed best in comparison to other classifiers, and it has an accuracy of 68% for movie reviews and 82% in case of tweets. The results of the proposed system are very promising and can be used in emerging applications like SA of product reviews and social media analysis. Additionally, the proposed system can be used in other cultural/social benefits like predicting/fighting human riots.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Howard ◽  
Marta M Maslej ◽  
Justin Lee ◽  
Jacob Ritchie ◽  
Geoffrey Woollard ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND Mental illness affects a significant portion of the worldwide population. Online mental health forums can provide a supportive environment for those afflicted and also generate a large amount of data that can be mined to predict mental health states using machine learning methods. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to benchmark multiple methods of text feature representation for social media posts and compare their downstream use with automated machine learning (AutoML) tools. We tested on datasets that contain posts labeled for perceived suicide risk or moderator attention in the context of self-harm. Specifically, we assessed the ability of the methods to prioritize posts that a moderator would identify for immediate response. METHODS We used 1588 labeled posts from the Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych) 2017 shared task collected from the Reachout.com forum. Posts were represented using lexicon-based tools, including Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner, Empath, and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, and also using pretrained artificial neural network models, including DeepMoji, Universal Sentence Encoder, and Generative Pretrained Transformer-1 (GPT-1). We used Tree-based Optimization Tool and Auto-Sklearn as AutoML tools to generate classifiers to triage the posts. RESULTS The top-performing system used features derived from the GPT-1 model, which was fine-tuned on over 150,000 unlabeled posts from Reachout.com. Our top system had a macroaveraged F1 score of 0.572, providing a new state-of-the-art result on the CLPsych 2017 task. This was achieved without additional information from metadata or preceding posts. Error analyses revealed that this top system often misses expressions of hopelessness. In addition, we have presented visualizations that aid in the understanding of the learned classifiers. CONCLUSIONS In this study, we found that transfer learning is an effective strategy for predicting risk with relatively little labeled data and noted that fine-tuning of pretrained language models provides further gains when large amounts of unlabeled text are available.


2020 ◽  
pp. 193-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hayder A. Alatabi ◽  
Ayad R. Abbas

Over the last period, social media achieved a widespread use worldwide where the statistics indicate that more than three billion people are on social media, leading to large quantities of data online. To analyze these large quantities of data, a special classification method known as sentiment analysis, is used. This paper presents a new sentiment analysis system based on machine learning techniques, which aims to create a process to extract the polarity from social media texts. By using machine learning techniques, sentiment analysis achieved a great success around the world. This paper investigates this topic and proposes a sentiment analysis system built on Bayesian Rough Decision Tree (BRDT) algorithm. The experimental results show the success of this system where the accuracy of the system is more than 95% on social media data.


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