Source: Karolina Grabowska/Pexels

"I think he's depressed," said Les' mother, furnishing screenshots of her son's social media posts.

Philosophical questions about the point of life had begun to appear, as was the sharing of melancholic artwork. Les (name disguised), a 16-year-old artist, historically shared his abstract landscape paintings on social media. Lately, he preferred depictions of lonely barrenness to his historically more detailed and brighter work. The posts supplemented Les' mother's and school personnel's interactive experiences with Les that his emotional landscape was darkening.

Given that youth spend a significant amount of time interacting online, I often ask parents whether they monitor their child's social media use for just such reasons. Social media can not only seem like a tangible support network with "likes" and comments to users but interacting through a screen can also remove the vulnerability factor, encouraging sharing.

Les' example isn't the only way social networking sites (SNS) offer a clinically-useful way to detect troubling emotions..

In 2013, De Choudhury et al. published research titled Social Media as a Measurement Tool of Depression in Populations. Since then, numerous researchers, especially of late, (e.g., Tadessee et al., 2019; Mann et al., 2020; Kim et al., 2021; Salas-Zarate et al., 2022) have investigated social media use as a depression-detection tool. Since depression is a leading cause of disability and suicide worldwide, getting better at early detection is crucial.

How SNS Patterns Can Reveal Depression Symptoms

In their pioneering work, De Choudhury and colleagues (2013) explained:

... we introduce a social media depression index that may serve to characterize levels of depression in populations. Geographical, demographic, and seasonal patterns of depression given by the measure confirm psychiatric findings and correlate highly with depression statistics reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In a second paper from 2021, Predicting Depression Via Social Media, the same researchers noted:

We find that social media contains useful signals for characterizing the onset of depression in individuals, as measured through decrease in social activity, raised negative affect, highly clustered egonetworks, heightened relational and medicinal concerns, and greater expression of religious involvement.

Later researchers explained that different social media platforms presented different material correlating to depression. For instance, Kim et al. (2019) noted that Facebook use indicators clustered around words relating to pain, explicit mention of depression symptoms, and rumination. Alternatively, on Twitter (now X), depression was more correlated to shortened posts and ones that focused on the past.

Also in 2019, Tadesse et al. similarly examined Reddit posts. The researchers found that many particular words were associated with depression-indicative posts. These not only included "depressed" or "unhappy," as might be suspected, but also words like "mine," "myself," "safe," "pressure," "winter," "hate," "sucks," and "distraction."

And it's not just social media posting material. Other researchers, like Roberts & David (2023), tell us that "passive social media use," or mindless scrolling, is correlated with feeling socially disconnected, which, of course, is often inherent in depression.

Lastly, with advances in technology, it appears that researchers are edging into sophisticated approaches to examine how to use social media as a barometer of well-being. Lin et al. (2020) explained an approach they call SenseMood:

A deep visual-textual multimodal learning approach has been proposed to reveal the psychological state of the users on social networks. The posted images and tweets data from users with/without depression on Twitter have been collected and used for depression detection. CNN and BERT [Convolutional neural networks, and bidrectional encoder representations from transformers] are applied to extract the deep features from the pictures and text posted by users respectively. Then visual and textual features are combined to reflect the emotional expression of users. Finally our system classifies the users with depression and normal users through a neural network, and the analysis report is generated automatically.

How This Information Can Help

Being vigilant for the aforementioned, whether it is reminiscent of oneself or a friend/loved one, could be useful in hindering the momentum of depression by revealing a red flag indicating the need for formal assessment.

The knowledge can be particularly useful for parents. Consider that depression isn’t always obvious at first glance and teens, by nature, might be less visible or interactive, creating a barrier to getting a true sense of emotional states. Therefore, parents are encouraged to monitor social media use not only for inappropriate material but for the hints of their child’s hidden emotional landscape. Helping professionals, from therapists to school personnel and pediatricians, are also encouraged to suggest that parents monitor for such material.

 

Source: Pexels/Kindred Media

Concerned friends or loved ones, noticing any of the above, might wish to gently initiate a conversation with the person about the observations. Consider that questions like "Why are you posting stuff like this?" can seem intrusive, aggressive, and alienating and could shut them down further from communicating about their experience.

Instead, a friendly but concerned approach is recommended. "By the way, Alex," a friend might say during a phone call, "I can't help but notice that your social media posts have had a lot of frustration content, and you're not as active in the forums we're on, which is unlike you, so I'm a little concerned. What's been going on?"

Talking like this might help the person face that they're struggling and establish support if needed. Further, it can help the concerned party gather more information and make a case for checking in with a professional. If such a talk heightens concern about a friend/loved one being depressed, the following steps can be useful:

• Remain supportive and offer to assist with finding a professional.
• If they balk, don't push, but remain vigilant and checking in.
• If they are open to speaking with a professional, finding a provider with openings can be a frustrating process these days; therefore:
  • Calling the closest medical school's psychiatry department, which is sure to have community connections, and asking who they recommend for depression screening and intervention can be helpful. Sometimes they have their own mood disorders clinics, such as at UCLA, which harbors a child/adolescent and adult specialty clinics.
  • In big cities, hospital psychiatry departments often have specialty mood disorder clinics, such as at Mass General in Boston.
  • Concerned parents can speak with the adjustment or guidance counselor at the child's school to learn about community resources.
  • Employee Assistance Programs can also be of assistance. Usually, these programs cover not only the employee but their family and assist in finding an appropriate provider and making appointments.
  • If concerns become heightened, such as after seeing material about self-injury, death/suicide, or other violence, consulting with the local psychiatric crisis center is recommended if the person doesn't have an outpatient provider to immediately connect with.