There is anxiety in the lockdown, the MIT AI says

Not that there was a particular need, we had unfortunately already acquired awareness of it through direct experience, but if someone so far had escaped the global health crisis and the consequent lockdowns cause anxiety: to underline this a new study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in collaboration with a team of Harvard University researchers shifting from the use of artificial intelligence.

COVID-19 and adverse effects on mental health: an AI can help

Specially trained algorithms is was asked to analyze the interventions published on Reddit from a total of 826,961 users, highlighting that following the spread of COVID-19, messages with more or less explicit references to states of soul such as restlessness, anguish and breathlessness, sometimes even suicidal will.

15 sections that deal specifically with mental health and 11 others that instead focus on different topics, for example r / PersonalFinance, were considered. testimony of how the concerns that arose during the pandemic affect not only the state of health, but also economic aspects to give an example. This is the comment of Daniel Low, one of the authors of the study.

We have discovered the emergence of clusters linked to suicidal tendencies and loneliness with the amount of posts on these topics more than doubled during the pandemic compared to same months of the previous year. It is a serious problem.

In the hopes of the researchers, an approach of this type could be a valid tool to sound an alarm bell in a completely automatic way and thus attract the attention of professionals, allowing them to intervene with initiatives of listening, support or moderation in the case of sharing on a public board or forum.

Source: MIT