Exploring the Utility of Community-Generated Social Media Content for Detecting Depression: An Analytical Study on Instagram

BACKGROUND: The content produced by individuals on various social media platforms has been successfully used to identify mental illness, including depression. However, most of the previous work in this area has focused on user-generated content, that is, content created by the individual, such as an individual’s posts and pictures. In this study, we explored the predictive capability of community-generated content, that is, the data generated by a community of friends or followers, rather than by a sole individual, to identify depression among social media users. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this research was to evaluate the utility of community-generated content on social media, such as comments on an individual’s posts, to predict depression as defined by the clinically validated Patient Health Questionnaire-8 (PHQ-8) assessment questionnaire. We hypothesized that the results of this research may provide new insights into next generation of population-level mental illness risk assessment and intervention delivery. METHODS: We created a Web-based survey on a crowdsourcing platform through which participants granted access to their Instagram profiles as well as provided their responses to PHQ-8 as a reference standard for depression status. After data quality assurance and postprocessing, the study analyzed the data of 749 participants. To build our predictive model, linguistic features were extracted from Instagram post captions and comments, including multiple sentiment scores, emoji sentiment analysis results, and meta-variables such as the number of likes and average comment length. In this study, 10.4% (78/749) of the data were held out as a test set. The remaining 89.6% (671/749) of the data were used to train an elastic-net regularized linear regression model to predict PHQ-8 scores. We compared different versions of this model (ie, a model trained on only user-generated data, a model trained on only community-generated data, and a model trained on the combination of both types of data) on a test set to explore the utility of community-generated data in our predictive analysis. RESULTS: The 2 models, the first trained on only community-generated data (area under curve [AUC]=0.71) and the second trained on a combination of user-generated and community-generated data (AUC=0.72), had statistically significant performances for predicting depression based on the Mann-Whitney U test (P=.03 and P=.02, respectively). The model trained on only user-generated data (AUC=0.63; P=.11) did not achieve statistically significant results. The coefficients of the models revealed that our combined data classifier effectively amalgamated both user-generated and community-generated data and that the 2 feature sets were complementary and contained nonoverlapping information in our predictive analysis. CONCLUSIONS: The results presented in this study indicate that leveraging community-generated data from social media, in addition to user-generated data, can be informative for predicting depression among social media users.