Estimating the effect of COVID-19 on mental health: Linguistic indicators of depression during a global pandemic

JT Wolohan

Keywords: LSTM, depression, Reddit, social media, COVID-19, coronavirus, depression prediction

TL;DR: Using an LSTM with fastText embeddings, we estimate depression rates may be up as much as 50% during COVID-19.

Abstract: This preliminary analysis uses a deep LSTM neural network with fastText embeddings to predict population rates of depression on Reddit in order to estimate the effect of COVID-19 on mental health. We find that year over year, depression rates on Reddit are up 50\% , suggesting a 15-million person increase in the number of depressed Americans and a \$7.5 billion increase in depression related spending. This finding comes at a time when uncertainty about the impact of COVID-19 on physical and economic health is still high, and suggests that in addition to those factors, mental health must be considered as well. As data becomes available, further research will be needed to validate the results of this preliminary investigation.