SMCT - An Innovative Tool for Mental Health Analysis of Twitter Data

Mental health conditions affect individuals, families and the wider community. It is estimated by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare that 45% of Australians will experience some form of mental health issue in their lifetime. The World Health Organization (WHO; Switzerland) has assessed that mental health is a cornerstone of overall health.Large-scale collection of data related to mental health is traditionally difficult and carried out infrequently. It is a challenge for researchers to assess seasonal, weekly or diurnal mental health trends. Social media has been demonstrated to present opportunities to extend traditional data collection techniques, particularly the expression of an individual's state of mind.The "Social Media Collection Tool" (SMCT) is a research tool developed to collect Twitter data for mental health analysis. Data collected is filtered to identify "of interest" users, allowing for cross-sectional analysis. Additionally, SMCT provides the capability to "re-poll" of interest users to develop a contextual understanding for these users on Twitter, providing a longitudinal analysis. SMCT, for the first time, combined the two data analysis techniques into a single tool.In demonstrative analysis scenarios the SMCT has collected more than 500,000 tweets and identified almost 6,000 as being of interest. The tool has also been used to investigate trends in the responses made by other users to an of interest tweet.