Subconscious Crowdsourcing: A feasible data collection mechanism for mental disorder detection on social media

Abstract

Mental disorders are currently affecting millions of people from different cultures, age groups and geographic regions. The challenge of mental disorders is that they are difficult to detect on suffering patients, thus presenting an alarming number of undetected cases and misdiagnosis. In this paper, we aim at building predictive models that leverage language and behavioral patterns, used particularly in social media, to determine whether a user is suffering from two cases of mental disorder. These predictive models are made possible by employing a novel data collection process, coined as Subconscious Crowdsourcing, which helps to collect a faster and more reliable dataset of patients. Our experiments suggest that extracting specific language patterns and social interaction features from reliable patient datasets can greatly contribute to further analysis and detection of mental disorders.