M-health - Social Media Mental Health Surveillance M-HEALTH: Detecting suicide Ideation in Switzerland using Twitter data

Social media are increasingly used to express psychological distress that can also be associated with suicidal thoughts. Social media are increasingly used across nearly all population groups for both, communicating and consuming information. Many users share their thoughts about specific topics and research scholars have just started to use social media to investigate psychological distress. However, we do not know much about how psychological distress communicated via social media is associated with suicidal thoughts. The detection of Suicidal Ideation (SI) in online social networks is becoming a very important research area for suicide prevention. A key aspect of prevention is addressing suicidal thoughts before they become an accomplished act. This project builds on the M-Health project dataset (https://givauzh.shinyapps.io/tweets_app), to detect suicidal ideation in Twitter data, as associated to eight basic emotions (e.g. fear, anger, sadness, disgust, confusion, shame, surprise, happiness) and to geographical and ecological variables (e.g. geographic location, environmental stress). Suicide affects all countries in the world. This research will focus on data from the whole of Switzerland and Ticino.