Detection of Suicidality Among Opioid Users on Reddit: Machine Learning-Based Approach

Area of Science:

• Computational social science
• Public health informatics
• Mental health research

Background:

• Rising rates of suicide and overdose highlight the need to understand the complex relationship between opioid use disorder and suicidal ideation.
• Intentional overdose is challenging to detect due to a lack of predictors and social stigma, leading individuals to express concerns online.
• Web-based platforms offer a potential avenue for individuals to articulate their struggles when traditional help-seeking is hindered.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate machine learning models for extracting posts indicating suicidality among individuals with opioid use disorder on Reddit.
• To enhance understanding of the motivations and experiences of individuals within the opioid epidemic.
• To provide data-driven insights for suicide prevention and intervention strategies.

Main Methods:

• Collected Reddit posts from relevant subreddits (suicide, depression, opioid-related, control) between June 2017 and June 2018.
• Employed traditional and neural network (NN) text classifiers to distinguish between suicidal and nonsuicidal language, and opioid users versus non-users.
• Utilized Amazon Mechanical Turk for data labeling to extract out-of-sample data intersecting suicide ideation and opioid abuse.

Main Results:

• Achieved classification performance exceeding 90% across models, with a convolutional neural network reaching an F1 score of 96.6%.
• Neural network classifiers showed a higher rate of false positives, while traditional methods produced more false negatives in predicting out-of-sample data for combined suicidal ideation and opioid abuse.
• Demonstrated the feasibility of using machine learning to identify specific user characteristics from social media data.

Conclusions:

• Opioid abuse is significantly associated with increased risks of unintentional overdose and suicide.
• Social media platforms like Reddit provide valuable, personal-level metadata for machine learning applications in public health.
• Machine learning, particularly NNs, can be effectively utilized to predict and identify individuals at risk for suicide within specific populations, such as those with opioid use disorder.