A Social Media Based Index of Mental Well-Being in College Campuses
Open accessAbstract
Psychological distress in the form of depression, anxiety and other mental health challenges among college students is a growing health concern. Dearth of accurate, continuous, and multi-campus data on mental well-being presents significant challenges to intervention and mitigation efforts in college campuses. We examine the potential of social media as a new "barometer" for quantifying the mental well-being of college populations. Utilizing student-contributed data in Reddit communities of over 100 universities, we first build and evaluate a transfer learning based classification approach that can detect mental health expressions with 97% accuracy. Thereafter, we propose a robust campus-specific Mental Well-being Index: MWI. We find that MWI is able to reveal meaningful temporal patterns of mental well-being in campuses, and to assess how their expressions relate to university attributes like size, academic prestige, and student demographics. We discuss the implications of our work for improving counselor efforts, and in the design of tools that can enable better assessment of the mental health climate of college campuses.
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Bagroy et al reported additional validation of such derived insights with feedback from clinical experts.
“Bagroy et al [56] reported additional validation of such derived insights with feedback from clinical experts [55].”
From Psychosocial Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Large-scale Quasi-Experimental Study on Social Media (2020) · cites this paper as [56]
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“Therefore, the main idea here is to infer mental health outcomes in an unlabeled data by transferring a classifier trained on a different labeled dataset, as first introduced by Bagroy et al. (2017).”
BackgroundSelf-citation
- Authors
- Bagroy, S., Kumaraguru, P., & De Choudhury, M.
- Affiliations
- Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IN)
- Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA, USA
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2017-05-02
- Volume
- 2017
- Pages
- 1634-1646
- PMC
- PMC5565736
- OpenAlex
- W2611802400
- Cited by
- 115
- References
- 60
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 19 · 2021: 22 · 2020: 14 · 2019: 15 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 3
- FWCI
- 19.51
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (1R01GM11269701)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Mental Health via Writing
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction
- Keywords
- psychological well-being, university students, social media, Reddit, mental health detection, transfer learning, psychological distress, depression, anxiety, temporal patterns
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