Identifying PTSD Symptoms Using Machine Learning Techniques on Social Media

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health illness brought on by watching or experiencing a horrific incident. Flashbacks, nightmares, acute anxiety, and uncontrolled thoughts about the unforgettable incident are the possible symptoms faced by PTSD sufferers. The PTSD diagnosis is usually done by a mental health specialist based on the symptoms that the person has, and the task is very time-consuming. Due to the widespread use of social media in recent years, it has opened up the opportunity to explore PTSD signs in users' postings on Twitter. The content-sharing feature available on this platform has allowed its users to share personal experiences, thoughts, and feelings that could reflect their psychological status. Thus, the goal of this work is to identify the PTSD symptom from text posting on Twitter. The crawled text posting is filtered and trained on selected machine learning and deep learning methods. The experiment results show that the support vector machine performed the best with 91% accuracy compared to others. This extracted model could be used in identifying PTSD symptoms on social media.