Predicting Mental illness (Depression) with the help of NLP Transformers

In today’s rapidly developing world, mental health is very important because it directly impacts the human thought process, productivity, relationships, etc. Being one of the most important aspects of a human’s life, it is often neglected. Poor mental health can lead to anxiety, hopelessness, struggling to manage emotions, a lack of concentration, and loneliness. A mentally ill person can also have suicidal thoughts. In today’s world, almost every person uses social media to share their lives and thoughts. With social media serving as a ubiquitous platform for self-expression and interaction, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques becomes feasible for detecting mental health statuses based on users’ social media posts. In this research paper, we proposed a methodology using NLP Transformers to study human behaviour as well as symptoms of depression. We analysed the status of mental health by examining the text of posts posted by different people on Twitter and Reddit. In our proposed methodology, we applied 4 different NLP Transformers (BERT, XLNet, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT) Transformers on two different datasets. Our proposed model concluded that DistilBert was the most accurate Transformer among the four with accuracy with 91% accuracy on twitter dataset and 84% accuracy on reddit dataset. Our proposed methodology will be effective in detecting mental illness in a person.