On the State of NLP Approaches to Modeling Depression in Social Media: A Post-COVID-19 Outlook
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Abstract (arXiv)
Computational approaches to predicting mental health conditions in social media have been substantially explored in the past years. Multiple reviews have been published on this topic, providing the community with comprehensive accounts of the research in this area. Among all mental health conditions, depression is the most widely studied due to its worldwide prevalence. The COVID-19 global pandemic, starting in early 2020, has had a great impact on mental health worldwide. Harsh measures employed by governments to slow the spread of the virus (e.g., lockdowns) and the subsequent economic downturn experienced in many countries have significantly impacted people's lives and mental health. Studies have shown a substantial increase of above 50% in the rate of depression in the population. In this context, we present a review on natural language processing (NLP) approaches to modeling depression in social media, providing the reader with a post-COVID-19 outlook. This review contributes to the understanding of the impacts of the pandemic on modeling depression in social media. We outline how state-of-the-art approaches and new datasets have been used in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, we also discuss ethical issues in collecting and processing mental health data, considering fairness, accountability, and ethics.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 48 of its 155 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2024.
Builds on
48 of 155 references.
References · 48
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36 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 4; 2026: 2.
6 papers.
- 2025Datasets for Depression Modeling in Social Media: An Overviewcited by 5
- 2025ReDSM5: A Reddit Dataset for DSM-5 Depression Detectioncited by 5
- 2025A Survey on Multilingual Mental Disorders Detection from Social Media Datacited by 3
- 2025SimClinician: A Multimodal Simulation Testbed for Reliable Psychologist AI Collaboration in Mental Health Diagnosiscited by 0
- 2026PsihoRo: Depression and Anxiety Romanian Text Corpuscited by 0
- 2026Mental Health Disorder Detection Beyond Social Media: A Systematic Review of Available Datasetscited by 0
- 2026Mental Health Disorder Detection Beyond Social Media: A Systematic Review of Available Datasets3 Jul 2026
- 2026PsihoRo: Depression and Anxiety Romanian Text Corpus20 Feb 2026
- 2025SimClinician: A Multimodal Simulation Testbed for Reliable Psychologist AI Collaboration in Mental Health Diagnosis28 Nov 2025
- 2025ReDSM5: A Reddit Dataset for DSM-5 Depression Detection5 Aug 2025
- 2025A Survey on Multilingual Mental Disorders Detection from Social Media Data21 May 2025
- 2025Datasets for Depression Modeling in Social Media: An Overview27 Mar 2025