Ruhr University Bochum PhD student Laurin Plank has been exploring the idea of using social media posts as a diagnostic aid for mental health conditions.
He says people could benefit from early detection.
“If people only ever get help once they’ve developed the disorder, then a lot of damage has already been done,” he said. “If we catch them before that develops fully, at a point in their lives where they have some deficits, but don’t notice them really, then we can maybe help them before it gets too bad.”
Plank says there are ethical risks to this field of research as well.
“Companies would probably be interested in using these models to determine whether an applicant is going to likely become mentally ill in the future, or is maybe already today. And this could lead to the companies rejecting these applicants just based on that information,” he said.
“That’s, I think, a great risk because people that are suffering from mental health issues are already discriminated [against] in various ways, and they already have problems holding jobs, and abusing these systems for that purpose could make their [lives] even harder.”
A recent study of Plank’s, published in the journal Schizophrenia, looked at the speech coherence of Reddit posts.
This episode also features a pair of segments from past episodes:
To hear the full interview with Gurleen Kaur sharing her experiences with psychosis, click here.
To hear the full interview with Leif Gregersen on his experiences educating groups about schizophrenia, click here.
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