心理健康密码就藏在社交动态里？

For the 20 percent of people with a mental illness, early identification of the condition is key to getting the best treatment. But people often suffer symptoms for months, even years, without receiving clinical attention. Part of the problem is that psychiatrists have few tools to identify mental illnesses; they rely mostly on self-reported data and observations from friends and family.

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But digital tools could help bring psychiatry into the modern age.The results of a recent study, conducted by Feinstein Institutes researchers and IBM Research, suggest that social media activity can provide useful insights into who's at risk of developing mental illnesses like mood disorders and schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

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The study used machine-learning algorithms to analyze millions of Facebook messages and images, which were provided voluntarily by participants, ages 15 to 35. The data represented participants' Facebook activity for 18 months prior to hospitalization.

Then the researches predict which group participants belonged to: schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), mood disorders (MD), or healthy volunteers (HV). 

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The study showed interesting  differences in Facebook activity among the groups, such as:

· The SSD group was more likely to use language related to perception (hear, see, feel).

· The MD and SSD groups were far more likely to use swear words and anger-related language.

· The MD group was more likely to use language related to biological processes (blood, pain).

· The SSD group was more likely to express negative emotions, use second-person pronouns and write in netspeak (lol, btw, thx).

· The MD group was more likely to post photos containing more blues and less yellows.

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These differences tended to become more apparent in the months before a patient was hospitalized. But even 18 months before hospitalization, the results revealed signals that hinted participants might be on the path to developing a psychiatric disorder. That's where these tools may someday help improve early-identification efforts.

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Dr. Birnbaum noted that everyone has a unique style of online behavior and that certain behavioral changes may contain clues about mental health.

"The way that we're understanding this is that everybody has a digital baseline, a way they typically act and behave on social media and the internet," he said. "So, ultimately here we would want to identify this baseline for each individual—a fingerprint—and then monitor for changes over time, and identify which changes are concerning, and which are not."

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Using digital tools to better identify psychiatric conditions could someday reduce the number of people who suffer without treatment. But before clinicians can use these kinds of digital approaches, researchers have more work to do.

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"The vast majority of the data thus far has been extracted from anonymous, or semi-anonymous individuals online, without any real way to validate the diagnosis or confirm the authenticity of the symptoms," Dr. Birnbaum said.

"I think that we need much larger datasets," Dr. Birnbaum said. "We need to repeat these findings. We need to better understand how demographic differences, like age, ethnicity and gender, can play a role."

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Privacy is another consideration. Dr. Birnbaum emphasized that these kinds of approaches would only be conducted on a voluntary basis, and that the Facebook data used in the recent study was anonymized, and the algorithms examined only individual words, not the context or meaning of sentences.

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"This isn't about surveillance, or that Facebook should somehow be monitoring us," Dr. Birnbaum said. "It's about giving the power to the patient. I imagine a world where patients could come into the doctor's office and express their concerns, but also provide some additional clinically meaningful information that they own."

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Dr. Birnbaum said,"Hopefully one day, we'll be able to incorporate this and other information to inform what we do, the same way you go to a doctor and you get an X-ray or a blood test to inform the diagnosis, it doesn't make the diagnosis, but it informs the doctor. That is where psychiatry is heading, and hopefully this is a step in that direction."

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