Estimating the effect of COVID-19 on mental health: Linguistic indicators of depression during a global pandemic

JT Wolohan


Abstract
This preliminary analysis uses a deep LSTM neural network with fastText embeddings to predict population rates of depression on Reddit in order to estimate the effect of COVID-19 on mental health. We find that year over year, depression rates on Reddit are up 50% , suggesting a 15-million person increase in the number of depressed Americans and a $7.5 billion increase in depression related spending. This finding suggests that utility in NLP approaches to longitudinal public-health surveillance.
Anthology ID:
2020.nlpcovid19-acl.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 at ACL 2020
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Karin Verspoor, Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, Mark Dredze, Emilio Ferrara, Jonathan May, Robert Munro, Cecile Paris, Byron Wallace
Venue:
NLP-COVID19
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.nlpcovid19-acl.12
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Cite (ACL):
JT Wolohan. 2020. Estimating the effect of COVID-19 on mental health: Linguistic indicators of depression during a global pandemic. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 at ACL 2020, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Estimating the effect of COVID-19 on mental health: Linguistic indicators of depression during a global pandemic (Wolohan, NLP-COVID19 2020)
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https://aclanthology.org/2020.nlpcovid19-acl.12.pdf