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Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health

Date Submitted: Dec 17, 2020
Date Accepted: Feb 13, 2021

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

Understanding Side Effects of Antidepressants: Large-scale Longitudinal Study on Social Media Data

Saha K, Torous J, Kiciman E, De Choudhury M

Understanding Side Effects of Antidepressants: Large-scale Longitudinal Study on Social Media Data

JMIR Ment Health 2021;8(3):e26589

DOI: 10.2196/26589

PMID: 33739296

PMCID: 8077932

Understanding Side Effects of Antidepressants: Large-scale Longitudinal Study on Social Media Data

  • Koustuv Saha; 
  • John Torous; 
  • Emre Kiciman; 
  • Munmun De Choudhury

ABSTRACT

Background:

Antidepressants are known to show heterogeneous effects across individuals and conditions, posing challenges to understanding their efficacy in mental health treatment.

Objective:

We aim to understand the side effects of antidepressants from naturalistic expressions of individuals on social media.

Methods:

On a large-scale Twitter dataset of individuals who self-reported using antidepressants, we conducted unsupervised language analysis to extract keywords that distinguish individuals who improved and who did not improve following the use of antidepressants.

Results:

We examined five major side effects of antidepressants, sleep, weight, eating, pain, and sexual. Social media language revealed keywords related to these side effects.

Conclusions:

This work enhances our understanding of the side effects of antidepressants by identifying distinct linguistic markers in the longitudinal social media data of individuals showing improved and worsened symptoms following the self-reported intake of antidepressants.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Saha K, Torous J, Kiciman E, De Choudhury M

Understanding Side Effects of Antidepressants: Large-scale Longitudinal Study on Social Media Data

JMIR Ment Health 2021;8(3):e26589

DOI: 10.2196/26589

PMID: 33739296

PMCID: 8077932

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