The social NLP researchers and mental health practitioners have witnessed exponential growth in the field of mental health detection and analysis on social media. It has become important to identify the reason behind mental illness. In this context, we introduce a new dataset for Causal Analysis of Mental health in Social media posts (CAMS). We first introduce the annotation schema for this task of causal analysis. The causal analysis comprises of two types of annotations, viz, causal interpretation and causal categorization. We show the efficacy of our scheme in two ways: (i) crawling and annotating 3155 Reddit data and (ii) re-annotate the publicly available SDCNL dataset of 1896 instances for interpretable causal analysis. We further combine them as CAMS dataset and make it available along with the other source codes https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CAMS1/. Our experimental results show that the hybrid CNN-LSTM model gives the best performance over CAMS dataset.

The mental disorder of online users is determined using social media posts. The major challenge in this domain is to avail the ethical clearance for using the user-generated text on social media platforms. Academic researchers identified the problem of insufficient and unlabeled data for mental health classification. To handle this issue, we have studied the effect of data augmentation techniques on domain-specific user-generated text for mental health classification. Among the existing well-established data augmentation techniques, we have identified Easy Data Augmentation (EDA), conditional BERT, and Back-Translation (BT) as the potential techniques for generating additional text to improve the performance of classifiers. Further, three different classifiers- Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Logistic Regression (LR) are employed for analyzing the impact of data augmentation on two publicly available social media datasets. The experimental results show significant improvements in classifiers’ performance when trained on the augmented data.