Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Dec 17, 2020
Date Accepted: Feb 13, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Understanding Side Effects of Antidepressants: Large-scale Longitudinal Study on Social Media Data
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
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Copyright
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