Social Network Data Could Be Used to Assess Mental Health

Researchers are now probing mental healths expression in speech and writing by analyzing social media posts. Danforth in harvard psychologist andrew rees, for example, analyzed the twitter posts of people with formal diagnoses of depression or post tramatic stress disorder that were written prior to diagnosis. With consent of participants, signs of depression begin to appear as many as nine months earlier. And facebook has an algarithm to detect users who seem to be at risk of suicide. Yet, social network data is still a long way from being used in patient care. Privacy issues are of ob os concern. There still work to be done to show how useful these analyses are.