Harnessing the Power of Hugging Face Transformers for Predicting Mental Health Disorders in Social Networks

Early diagnosis of mental disorders and intervention can facilitate the prevention of severe injuries and the improvement of treatment results. This study uses social media and pre-trained language models to explore how user-generated data can predict mental disorder symptoms. Our study compares four different BERT models of Hugging Face with standard machine learning techniques used in automatic depression diagnosis in recent literature. The results show that new models outperform the previous approach with an accuracy rate of up to 97%. Analyzing the results while complementing past findings, we find that even tiny amounts of data (Like users’ bio descriptions) have the potential to predict mental disorders. We conclude that social media data is an excellent source of mental health screening, and pre-trained models can effectively automate this critical task.