Social Participation of Depressed Individuals as an Optimisation Problem

Depression is the most significant mental illness of our time. In the USA, 9.5 % of the population of an age from 18 and older exhibit depression symptoms, while the Australian government statistics argue that the whole population will show depressive symptoms at some point in their lives. Depressed individuals often find hard to participate to social activities, either due to loss of interest or bad emotional state. Thus, this has a a major impact on the familiarisation of the patient with the community. In this paper, we address the problem of the participation of depressed individuals to a conversation as an optimisation problem. Specifically, we employ the term information entropy to decide when a depressed individual is suitable for participating in a conversation and we formulate it as a non- convex optimisation problem. In order to stabilise the interacting persons we show that we can utilise a heuristic approach that excludes the depressed individual from the conversation, when their entropy is high. We show results with social participation scenarios of healthy and depressed persons using our approach.