Researchers Create Algorithm That Diagnoses Depression From Your Instagram Feed (inverse.com) 84
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inverse: Harvard University's Andrew Reece and the University of Vermont's Chris Danforth crafted an algorithm that can correctly diagnose depression, with up to 70 percent accuracy, based on a patient's Instagram feed alone. After a careful screening process, the team analyzed almost 50,000 photos from 166 participants, all of whom were Instagram users and 71 of whom had already been diagnosed with clinical depression. Their results confirmed their two hypotheses: first, that "markers of depression are observable in Instagram user behavior," and second, that "these depressive signals are detectable in posts made even before the date of first diagnosis." The duo had good rationale for both hypotheses. Photos shared on Instagram, despite their innocent appearance, are data-laden: Photos are either taken during the day or at night, in- or outdoors. They may include or exclude people. The user may or may not have used a filter. You can imagine an algorithm drooling at these binary inputs, all of which reflect a person's preferences, and, in turn, their well-being. Metadata is likewise full of analyzable information: How many people liked the photo? How many commented on it? How often does the user post, and how often do they browse? Many studies have shown that depressed people both perceive less color in the world and prefer dark, anemic scenes and images. The majority of healthy people, on the other hand, prefer colorful things. [Reece and Danforth] collected each photo's hue, saturation, and value averages. Depressed people, they found, tended to post photos that were more bluish, unsaturated, and dark. "Increased hue, along with decreased brightness and saturation, predicted depression," they write. The researchers found that happy people post less than depressed people, happy people post photos with more people in them than their depressed counterparts. and that depressed participants were less likely to use filters. The majority of "healthy" participants chose the Valencia filter, while the majority of "depressed" participants chose the Inkwell filter. Inverse has a neat little chart embedded in their report that shows the usage of Instagram filters between depressed and healthy users.
100% Accuracy! (Score:1)
...After a careful screening process
Re: 100% Accuracy! (Score:1)
Complete idiots. It is possible to improve people and their nervous system using just images and sounds but now they are doing the opposite and it doesnt make sense to develop antidepressants and related things any further for psychiatric idiotism.
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We should force depressed people to watch every episode of My Little Pony.
My Instagram feed is nonexistent (Score:5, Insightful)
If my instagram feed is nonexistent, does that make me a nihilist? Or is it indicative of me not basing my worth on what random people think about my every waking moment? (Or is that twitter or Facebook .. its had to tell these days)
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You are not alone though. I too have no desire for social media. I don't like taking pictures or talking about myself. I don't really care if people like or dislike that stuff if I did publicize it. And like you this has impacted me in a negative way. But I will continue to stand my ground. I honestly think social media is damaging to society.
Not only is it damaging because it stigmatizes people who are private, encourages narcissistic behavior, and also contributes to attention deficit disorder. It seems l
Re:My Instagram feed is nonexistent (Score:5, Insightful)
If my instagram feed is nonexistent, does that make me a nihilist?
No, I think it would make you a typical slashdot user. Someone with the ability to communicate with words instead of pictures and videos.
And somewhat depressed at seeing the rest of the world falling behind.
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If my instagram feed is nonexistent, does that make me a nihilist?
No, I think it would make you a typical slashdot user. Someone with the ability to communicate with words instead of pictures and videos. And somewhat depressed at seeing the rest of the world falling behind.
And NOT some typical college coed with an impossible figure. The kind that probably has daddy issues, loves attention and is one photo dislike away from becoming a stripper.
A picture is worth a thousand words (Score:2)
Privacy concerns and general Facebook scumminess aside, a consolidated text
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tl;dr
Why didn't you just post a video? But more seriously:
I would've preferred it to have happened in your browser which could automatically poll certain bookmarked sites every x hours, and put any of those pages updated since your last visit into a special folder (would be really handy for the list of web comics I follow).
Congratulations, you just described an RSS reader, and the way I've been using it for two decades now. INOReader, for one, can even poll some social media sites. Did you seriously never learn about RSS? I mean, it's decades old and designed to do exactly what you're describing.
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Or you're intelligent to have accounts but not give away everything.
I take pictures of college club sporting events for fun and upload to all of the above. If they (the sites) want my birth day it's the same birthday I've had since I was 16, sometime in the 1920s. If they want a picture of "Me" it's my company's logo.
Facebook, Instagram, et al are not that different from Usenet and IRC. They only have the information you give them. It's not Usenet's fault if I decide to upload my home address to the service
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It means that to diagnose you they would need a different set of inputs to feed the algorithms. You could apply the same methodology to Slashdot posts, Usenet posts, hand written letters or any other output generated by you.
"Those people that used the word nihlist were 40% more likely to be depressed while those people that made less negative comments tended to be less of a dick."
Or is it indicative of me not basing my worth on what random people think about my every waking moment?
Yeah, because Slashdot provides no feedback mechanisms. It's only since Facebook and Instagram have people ever known what others
70% accuracy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm, 166 users, 71 of whom were known depressed. 70% accuracy means they picked 50 of the depressed people as depressed, and 28 (or 29) of the non-depressed people as depressed.
Given that the national depression rate is 6.7% (take that with a grain of salt), we'd expect to see, based on this test, 32.7% of the population found to be depressed. Of that 32.7%, one in seven would actually be depressed....
Color me less than impressed with this study.
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Chatbot (Score:2)
But in theory you could combine with other indicators. /. lately.
Group togher with all the other "Depression could be predicted based on your behaviour on XyZ social network" studies that have been mentioned here on
Then you can have an even smaller cohort of "potentially depressed social netowrk users".
And you could target them for prevention.
Instead of displaying ads, you could display public service announcement (about services that exist to support depressed people, etc.)
You could actively contact them (
I must be suicidal (Score:1)
I must be suicidal since I don't use it at all
DUH (Score:3, Interesting)
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Great (Score:2, Insightful)
Another tool for insurance companies to preemptively cancel your policy.
Easy. (Score:5, Funny)
depression=true;
else
depression=false;
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According to the study, it's the reverse. If you post more, you are less likely to be depressed
TFS:
The researchers found that happy people post less than depressed people
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I wish.
No instagram feed at all, but nevertheless a depression (more or less manageable thanks to SSRI and NDRI).
Actually it is somewhat surprising that depressed people allegedly post more on instagram - listlessness is one of the symptoms of depression because, well, what's the point?
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Most of the responses to this study are specious Slashdot crap, but this is actually a good question.
Hormone and neurotransmitter levels change in response to various stimuli; these changes in turn cause cognitive and emotional changes.
The problem becomes complicated because those cognitive and emotional changes can lead to behaviors which cause or exacerbate depression.
E.g., stress raises cortisol levels, cortisol reduces dopamine levels, and low dopamine is associated with depression.
As with many medical
Turns out the algorithm was pretty simple (Score:5, Funny)
then depression = yes
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if (number_of_posts_per_day > 3)
then depression = yes
Shit. Does that apply to here as well??
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Slashdot's posting delay is doing its best to make sure everyone is happy.
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Only if your post contains no color.
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if (number_of_posts_per_day > 3)
then depression = yes
Leading to ASCII-art code:
if ( instagram_user 3 friends)
then depression = no
Double entendre intended.
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And of course I forgot that /. still eats characters like crazy.
try again:
Which one is causing the other? (Score:2)
Horseshit! (Score:2)
As a clinically depressed person... My Instagram feed has a variety of photos with varying degrees of saturation, hues, and taken at various times of the day.
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Are you being treated, or received treatment, for your depression? If so that could explain your variety of photos, assuming that the treatment has produced some positive results (medications are working, CBT has changed thinking patterns). Or you just could be part of the group that this algorithm doesn't pick up.
Reliability (Score:2)
It may seem like a fun toy, but given that some researchers are seriously questioning whether 'major depression' is a single well-defined illness, and whether human diagnostic means are reliable, does anybody seriously think this will work reliably in a clinical setting the way an ECG does.
I'm misdiagnosed (Score:2)
... depressed people both perceive less color in the world and prefer dark, anemic scenes and images.
I just take really crappy pictures and my camera's flash is broken.
'Correctly diagnose' != '70% accuracy' ! (Score:2)
Correctly diagnose
70% Accuracy
CHOOSE ONE AND ONE ONLY!
..and when the Health Department comes to your door with a couple burly orderlies and informs you that 'you're depressed, citizen, and in the interests of your safety and the safety of the public, we're required to enforce antidepressants on you', what do you do then? Why are you people still using so-called 'social media'???
reeducation centers (Score:1)
The fundamental problem with surveillance states (Score:1)
This is, in a nutshell, why the massively invasive and expensive surveillance state will both fail and be massively oppressive.
Because "70% accuracy" is currently a level that's considered an achievement, and that people don't seem to understand that 70% accuracy is next to worthless. Worse than useless, really.
The mistaken assumption is that, if you run this algorithm on a large population, that 70% of the people
Easy (Score:2)
Just count how many times they post vauge statuses and lyrics from 80's songs.
I have created my own algo (Score:2)
It reads your Instagram feed and diagnoses narcissism.
Diagnoses depression incorrectly 30% of the time! (Score:1)
Well, I guess it's better than a coin flip.
Descriptors make no sense (Score:2)
"Increased hue, along with decreased brightness and saturation, predicted depression,"
hue = saturation
How can I increase hue while simultaneously decreasing it? Even the dictionary gets hue wrong...
hue |(h)yo| - noun - a color or shade
A color, yes, but not a shade... shade is when black is added to a hue; tint is when white is added to it.
Wrong place for people photos (Score:2)
Someone should tell them that Instagram, like Flickr before it, is a public photo sharing platform, used mainly to showcase photography, not pictures of friends and family. There's already Facebook for that, so you're unlikely to see that many pictures of people.
I don't have an Instagram account... (Score:2)
Or not.
How long till "Facewash for Instagram"? (Score:2)
There's a service called "FaceWash" that cleans up your FB account to make it suitable for inspection by prospective employers, etc. http://mashable.com/2013/01/25... [mashable.com] I could easily see a similar application happening for Instagram. This could undermine the entire basis of using Instagram feeds as appraisal tools.
"Up to 70% accuracy" (Score:2)