Natural language processing (NLP) would be useful to find trends in the mental health of young people living with anxiety.
The Crisis Text Line, is a non-profit organization that provides mental health support to people, usually young people, via text message. In this sense, they recently published a study showing that the use of PLN could generate relevant information to improve mental health care.
The study shows that, through the PLN, the extraction of information from conversations carried out by Crisis Text Line in 2021 was achieved. Around 40 million messages were exchanged between young people and counselors. In addition, 70% of the conversations were established with people under 25 years of age, a relevant fact about the state of mental health of young people in the United States.
The main topic of the conversations was anxiety, which reached its highest point during 2019, according to previous reports from the organization. The PLN through its neural networks can analyze information such as text, voice, to generate relevant information.
In this way it was possible to classify and analyze massive amounts of messages that are unstructured data. For the study, more than 1.3 million conversations were analyzed, analyzing the topics of each conversation in search of information that explores the risk of suicide among users.
In 2021, the words most used by users of the line were “thinking”, “help”, “mom”, “depressed” and “time”. Thanks to the PLN, it was possible for The Crisis Text Line to identify trends in the mental health of young users in order to improve their care.
In addition, the counselors have implemented techniques through digital media such as construction video games, videos on physical self-care, promotion of exercise through videos, among others, which are intended to be a coping mechanism for anxiety problems.
