Mental Health Safety and Depression Detection in Social Media Text Data: A Classification Approach Based on a Deep Learning Model

Social media expansion enables real-time mental health monitoring particularly for depression detection through its platforms. Traditional depression detection techniques, however, struggle to handle the informal, often ambiguous nature of language used in social media, including emojis, slang, and...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shiwen Zhou, Masnizah Mohd
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2025-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10960428/
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1850150754934849536
author Shiwen Zhou
Masnizah Mohd
author_facet Shiwen Zhou
Masnizah Mohd
author_sort Shiwen Zhou
collection DOAJ
description Social media expansion enables real-time mental health monitoring particularly for depression detection through its platforms. Traditional depression detection techniques, however, struggle to handle the informal, often ambiguous nature of language used in social media, including emojis, slang, and context-dependent expressions. To address this limitation, this research proposes a novel framework for depression detection that integrates advanced text preprocessing with a deep learning model. The preprocessing pipeline contains two key components where emojis are converted into text by emoji normalization then slang expressions are replaced through a customized dictionary. Emotion scores serve as additional components to identify depression-related emotional cues within the text. The model combines BERT’s contextual embeddings with BiLSTM’s sequential processing power to effectively represent emotional content in social media posts. The proposed approach demonstrates superior performance compared to traditional baseline models by achieving better results in accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, AUC and RGA. This approach shows exceptional performance in detecting depression through informal texts which serves as a new benchmark for depression detection in dynamic social media environments.
format Article
id doaj-art-b0c2d0a58bc749369358587647afef38
institution OA Journals
issn 2169-3536
language English
publishDate 2025-01-01
publisher IEEE
record_format Article
series IEEE Access
spelling doaj-art-b0c2d0a58bc749369358587647afef382025-08-20T02:26:27ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362025-01-0113632846329710.1109/ACCESS.2025.355917010960428Mental Health Safety and Depression Detection in Social Media Text Data: A Classification Approach Based on a Deep Learning ModelShiwen Zhou0https://orcid.org/0009-0000-1967-6199Masnizah Mohd1https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8908-8755Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, MalaysiaFaculty of Information Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, MalaysiaSocial media expansion enables real-time mental health monitoring particularly for depression detection through its platforms. Traditional depression detection techniques, however, struggle to handle the informal, often ambiguous nature of language used in social media, including emojis, slang, and context-dependent expressions. To address this limitation, this research proposes a novel framework for depression detection that integrates advanced text preprocessing with a deep learning model. The preprocessing pipeline contains two key components where emojis are converted into text by emoji normalization then slang expressions are replaced through a customized dictionary. Emotion scores serve as additional components to identify depression-related emotional cues within the text. The model combines BERT’s contextual embeddings with BiLSTM’s sequential processing power to effectively represent emotional content in social media posts. The proposed approach demonstrates superior performance compared to traditional baseline models by achieving better results in accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, AUC and RGA. This approach shows exceptional performance in detecting depression through informal texts which serves as a new benchmark for depression detection in dynamic social media environments.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10960428/BERT-BiLSTMdepression detectionsocial mediamental healthnatural language processing (NLP)
spellingShingle Shiwen Zhou
Masnizah Mohd
Mental Health Safety and Depression Detection in Social Media Text Data: A Classification Approach Based on a Deep Learning Model
IEEE Access
BERT-BiLSTM
depression detection
social media
mental health
natural language processing (NLP)
title Mental Health Safety and Depression Detection in Social Media Text Data: A Classification Approach Based on a Deep Learning Model
title_full Mental Health Safety and Depression Detection in Social Media Text Data: A Classification Approach Based on a Deep Learning Model
title_fullStr Mental Health Safety and Depression Detection in Social Media Text Data: A Classification Approach Based on a Deep Learning Model
title_full_unstemmed Mental Health Safety and Depression Detection in Social Media Text Data: A Classification Approach Based on a Deep Learning Model
title_short Mental Health Safety and Depression Detection in Social Media Text Data: A Classification Approach Based on a Deep Learning Model
title_sort mental health safety and depression detection in social media text data a classification approach based on a deep learning model
topic BERT-BiLSTM
depression detection
social media
mental health
natural language processing (NLP)
url https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10960428/
work_keys_str_mv AT shiwenzhou mentalhealthsafetyanddepressiondetectioninsocialmediatextdataaclassificationapproachbasedonadeeplearningmodel
AT masnizahmohd mentalhealthsafetyanddepressiondetectioninsocialmediatextdataaclassificationapproachbasedonadeeplearningmodel