Multi-task learning on mental disorder detection, sentiment analysis, and emotion detection using social media posts.*

Mental disorders such as suicidal behavior, bipolar disorder, depressive disorders, and anxiety have been diagnosed among the youth recently. Social media platforms such as Reddit have become popular for anonymous posts. People are far more likely to share on these social media platforms what they really feel like in their real lives when they are anonymous. It is thus helpful to extract people’s sentiments and feelings from these platforms in training models for mental disorder detection. This study uses multi-task learning techniques to examine the estimation of behaviors and mental states for early mental disease diagnosis. We propose a multi-task system trained on three related tasks: mental disorder detection as the primary task, emotion analysis, and sentiment analysis as auxiliary tasks. We took the SWMH dataset, which included four main different mental disorders already labeled (bipolar, depression, anxiety, and suicide) and offmychest. We then added labels for emotion and sentiment to the dataset. The observed results are comparable to previous studies in the field and demonstrate that deep learning multi-task frameworks can improve the accuracy of related text classification tasks when compared to training them separately as single-task systems.