Schizophrenia, a chronic mental disorder affecting thoughts and behaviors, is a challenging condition to identify due to its low prevalence and the affected individuals often being unaware of their disorder. Linguistic abnormalities are a key characteristic of Schizophrenia, with language manifesting many of its symptoms.
In this study, the researchers turned to social media as a source of data to investigate linguistic indicators of Schizophrenia. By analyzing a large corpus of Reddit posts, the researchers were able to identify linguistic features that differentiate users with Schizophrenia from a control group.
The researchers also developed a machine learning classifier to automatically detect self-identified users with Schizophrenia on Reddit. These findings shed light on the potential of social media in detecting and understanding Schizophrenia and could pave the way for earlier diagnosis and intervention.
Read the paper: Linguistic Analysis of Schizophrenia in Reddit Posts
