Scalable mental health analysis in the clinical whitespace via natural language processing

Our increasingly digital life provides a wealth of data about our behavior, beliefs, mood, and well-being. This data provides some insight into the lives of patients outside the healthcare setting, and in aggregate can be insightful for the person's mental health and emotional crisis. Here, we introduce this community to some of the recent advancement in using natural language processing and machine learning to provide insight into mental health of both individuals and populations. We advocate using these linguistic signals as a supplement to those that are collected in the health care system, filling in some of the so-called “whitespace” between visits.