According to Michael Slezak, “oversharing on Twitter might prove to be a boon for mental health services”:
Grabbing 750 tweets a second, a new tool can read the emotional state of a region in real time. The idea is to figure out exactly what kinds of events affect people’s moods and tailor mental health treatments accordingly.
Researchers at Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO, and the Black Dog Institute in Sydney, created an emotional vocabulary of about 600 words and confirmed their meaning by crowdsourcing responses from over 1,200 people. They built an app that filters tweets by location and linguistically analyses their emotional content. The output is an interactive graph of the target region’s mood. It shows how much each of seven emotions are being expressed in that region. “If it works then in the future we can monitor, and eventually predict, where services can be assigned,” says Cécile Paris, a computer scientist at the CSIRO. The plan is to make the app available for researchers anywhere.
On a similar note, researchers in the US have identified a link between suicide-related tweets and actual suicides.
The Dish 