Discerning mental illnesses from social media posts using machine and deep learning algorithms

Deep learning has played a pivotal role in solving a wide array of problems. These powerful models can also be used for detecting mental illness. Knowing this in advance shall help individuals to utilize appropriate prophylactic measures and might even help cure them. Reddit is used to identify one’s language patterns through social media posts. Machine Learning and Deep Learning are used to develop promising models that predict if a person is likely to show signs of mental illness. Machine Learning(ML) and Deep Learning(DL) based models like Logistic Regression, Artificial Neural Networks(ANN),Convolution Neural Networks(CNN) and state-of-the-art models like Bi-Directional Encoder Representations from Transformers are leveraged. Results showcase that Deep Learning shows promising results and can be utilized as an ‘initial measure’ of finding if a person has a mental illness and with accuracy scores of above 80% they can prove to be a ‘game changer’.