Artificial intelligence model can detect mental health conditions on Reddit

An artificial intelligence model has been created that can detect the mental health of a user, just by analysing their conversations on social platform Reddit. A team of computer scientists from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire set about training an AI model to analyze social media texts. It is part of an emerging wave of screening tools that use computers to analyze social media posts and gain an insight into people's mental states. The team selected Reddit to train their model as it has half a billion active users, all regularly discussing a wide range of topics over a network of subreddits. They focused on looking for emotional intent from the post, rather than at the actual content, and found it performs better over time at discovering mental health issues.