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© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Mental health issues can have significant impacts on individuals and communities and hence on social sustainability. There are several challenges facing mental health treatment; however, more important is to remove the root causes of mental illnesses because doing so can help prevent mental health problems from occurring or recurring. This requires a holistic approach to understanding mental health issues that are missing from the existing research. Mental health should be understood in the context of social and environmental factors. More research and awareness are needed, as well as interventions to address root causes. The effectiveness and risks of medications should also be studied. This paper proposes a big data and machine learning-based approach for the automatic discovery of parameters related to mental health from Twitter data. The parameters are discovered from three different perspectives: Drugs and Treatments, Causes and Effects, and Drug Abuse. We used Twitter to gather 1,048,575 tweets in Arabic about psychological health in Saudi Arabia. We built a big data machine learning software tool for this work. A total of 52 parameters were discovered for all three perspectives. We defined six macro-parameters (Diseases and Disorders, Individual Factors, Social and Economic Factors, Treatment Options, Treatment Limitations, and Drug Abuse) to aggregate related parameters. We provide a comprehensive account of mental health, causes, medicines and treatments, mental health and drug effects, and drug abuse, as seen on Twitter, discussed by the public and health professionals. Moreover, we identify their associations with different drugs. The work will open new directions for a social media-based identification of drug use and abuse for mental health, as well as other micro and macro factors related to mental health. The methodology can be extended to other diseases and provides a potential for discovering evidence for forensics toxicology from social and digital media.

Details

Title
Psychological Health and Drugs: Data-Driven Discovery of Causes, Treatments, Effects, and Abuses
Author
Alswedani, Sarah 1 ; Mehmood, Rashid 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Katib, Iyad 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Altowaijri, Saleh M 3   VIAFID ORCID Logo 

 Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia 
 High-Performance Computing Center, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia 
 Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, Northern Border University, Rafha 91911, Saudi Arabia 
First page
287
Publication year
2023
Publication date
2023
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
23056304
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2791742531
Copyright
© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.