A Sequential Emotion Approach for Diagnosing Mental Disorder on Social Media

Mental disorder has been affecting numerous individuals; however, mental health care is in a passive state where only a minority of individuals actively seek professional help. Due to the rapid development of social networks, individuals accustomed to expressing their raw feelings on social media include patients who are suffering great pain from mental disorders. To distinguish individuals who merely feel sad and others who have mental disorders, the symptoms of mental disorder are taken into consideration. These symptoms constantly arise as a regular pattern like shifting of emotions or repeating of one representative emotion during a certain time. We proposed a Mental Disorder Identification Model (MDI-Model) to identify the four most commonly occurring mental disorders in the world: anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, depressive disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The MDI-Model compares the sequential emotion pattern from users to identify mental disorders to detect those who are in a high risk. Tweets of diagnosed mental disorder users were analyzed to evaluate the accuracy of the MDI-Model, furthermore, the tweets of users from six different occupations were analyzed to verify the precision and predict the tendency of mental disorder among the different occupations. Results show that the MDI-Model can efficiently diagnose users with high precision in different mental statuses as severe, moderate, and mild stage, or tendency of mental disorder and mentally healthy status.