Individuals with depression express more distorted thinking on social media

Krishna C. Bathina, 

Marijn ten Thij, 

Lorenzo Lorenzo-Luaces, 

Lauren A. Rutter & 

Johan Bollen 

Nature Human Behaviour volume 5, pages458–466(2021)

Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide [утверждение глубоко сомнительное, зато в открытом доступе, отлично от некоторых], but is often underdiagnosed and undertreated. Cognitive-behavioral therapy holds that individuals with depression exhibit distorted modes of thinking, that is, cognitive distortions, that can negatively affect their emotions and motivation. Here, we show that the language of individuals with a self-reported diagnosis of depression on social media is characterized by higher levels of distorted thinking compared with a random sample. This effect is specific to the distorted nature of the expression and cannot be explained by the presence of specific topics, sentiments, or first-person pronouns. This study identifies online language patterns that are indicative of depression-related distorted thinking. We caution that any future applications of this research should carefully consider ethical and data privacy issues.

Category	Definition	Examples
Catastrophizing	Exaggerating the importance of negative events	‘The evening will be a disaster’
Dichotomous reasoning	Thinking that an inherently continuous situation can fall into only two categories	‘No one will ever like me’
Disqualifying the positive	Unreasonably discounting positive experiences	‘OK but my grade was not that good’
Emotional reasoning	Thinking that something is true on the basis of how one feels, ignoring the evidence to the contrary	‘My grades are good but it still feels like I will fail’
Fortune-telling	Making predictions, usually negative ones, about the future	‘Whatever I try I will not be successful’
Labelling and mislabelling	Labelling yourself or others while discounting evidence that could lead to less disastrous conclusions	‘I am a total loser’
Magnification and minimization	Magnifying negative aspects or minimizing positive aspects	‘My good grades are really not important’
Mental filtering	Paying too much attention to negative details instead of the whole picture	‘If I only worked harder, I would be more successful’
Mindreading	Believing you know what others are thinking	‘Everyone believes I am a failure’
Overgeneralizing	Making sweeping negative conclusions on the basis of a few examples	‘Nobody ever cares for me’
Personalizing	Believing others are behaving negatively because of oneself, without considering more plausible or external explanations for behaviour	‘Everyone thinks I am a loser for calling her’
Should statements	Having a fixed idea on how you and/or others should behave	‘I have to to do this or I will not make it to the weekend’

Cohort of individuals with depression

We identified a cohort of individuals with depression who (1) received a clinical diagnosis of depression and (2) explicitly reported this diagnosis on social media using a variant of the statement ‘I was diagnosed with depression by my doctor’. (3) A team of experts rated each statement to ensure that the statement actually reports a personal, clinical diagnosis of depression, after which (4) the individual’s timeline (all tweets up to the limit allowed by the Twitter data service: the 3,200 most recent tweets) was downloaded and added to our analysis cohort. Twitter, tweet, retweet, and the Twitter logo are trademarks of Twitter, Inc. or its affiliates.