Sinister side of social media depression app

Ok, so what sounded like a good idea to many made the hair stand up on the back of too many necks when it involves using social media to predict depression.

Let's get honest here. I use Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus for Wounded Times but on a personal level, I don't get into any of them very often. I just don't have time. I work a full time job for a paycheck and then full time on tracking news reports. A lot of people I talk to don't use social media because their friends share everything from what they just ate for lunch to how many times their baby needed a diaper change.

Then there are people with a lot of "friends" on their list they don't know and real friends too busy to read every keystroke. What is worse is when someone does unload how they're feeling and no one responds.

There are times when social media pulls someone out of a huge jam, solves problems and changes lives for the better but most of the time, people end up wondering why no one cares about them or why they are not one of the chosen to receive what others get. It isn't how many friends you have, but what kind of friends you have that makes the difference in life.

There were some cases of depressed veterans with PTSD being talked off the ledge because of Facebook and it even happened a few times to servicemembers. Most of the time, it doesn't happen at all.

There are great sites with experts working on PTSD and proper peer support but then there are far too many with hacks more interested in their own glory pushing their followers to believe garbage tossed at them as if they have the answers to all the problems in life.

Now there is a far darker side to what sounded like a good idea and that how depressed people reaching out for help can be left victimized with no assurance from anyone.

The CDC already knew depression levels by state but what they don't mention is, after all these years they still haven't come up with a way of addressing clinical depression and that is in itself depressing.

CDC Data and Statistics
Feature: An Estimated 1 in 10 U.S. Adults Current Depression Among Adults
United States, 2006 and 2008. MMWR 2010;59(38);1229-1235. 
(this map includes revised state estimates)

Risks in Using Social Media to Spot Signs of Mental Distress
New York Times
By NATASHA SINGER
DEC. 26, 2014

For one thing, said Dr. Allen J. Frances, a psychiatrist who is a professor emeritus at Duke University School of Medicine, crude predictive health algorithms would be likely to mistake someone’s articulation of distress for clinical depression, unfairly labeling swaths of people as having mental health disorders.

For another thing, he said, if consumers felt free to use unvalidated diagnostic apps on one another, it could potentially pave the way for insurers and employers to use such techniques covertly as well — with an attendant risk of stigmatization and discrimination.

The Samaritans, a well-known suicide-prevention group in Britain, recently introduced a free web app that would alert users whenever someone they followed on Twitter posted worrisome phrases like “tired of being alone” or “hate myself.”

A week after the app was introduced on its website, more than 4,000 people had activated it, the Samaritans said, and those users were following nearly 1.9 million Twitter accounts, with no notification to those being monitored. But just about as quickly, the group faced an outcry from people who said the app, called Samaritans Radar, could identify and prey on the emotionally vulnerable — the very people the app was created to protect.

“A tool that ‘lets you know when your friends need support’ also lets you know when your stalking victim is vulnerable #SamaritansRadar,” a Briton named Sarah Brown posted on Twitter. A week and a half after the app’s introduction, the Samaritans announced it was reconsidering the outreach program and disabled the app.

Munmun De Choudhury, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech. Credit Amber Fouts for The New York Times Social media posts offer a vast array of information — things as diverse as clues about the prevalence of flu, attitudes toward smoking and patterns of prescription drug abuse. Academic researchers, often in partnership with social media platforms, have mined this data in the hopes of gaining more timely insights into population-scale health trends. The National Institutes of Health, for instance, recently committed more than $11 million to support studies into using sites like Twitter and Facebook to better understand, prevent and treat substance abuse.

Dr. Eric Horvitz, the director of the Microsoft Research lab at Redmond, Wash., said his group’s studies demonstrated the potential for using social media as a tool to measure population-level depression patterns — as a complement to more traditional research methods.

“We could compute the unhappiest places in the United States,” Dr. Horvitz said. He added that social media analysis might also eventually be used to identify patterns of post-traumatic stress disorder immediately after events like tsunamis or terrorist attacks. “You can see the prospect of watching a news story break and using these tools to map the pulse of society,” he said.

But researchers generally agreed that it was premature to apply such nascent tools to individuals.

“People always ask, ‘Can you predict who is going to try to commit suicide?’ ” said Dr. Dredze, the Johns Hopkins researcher. “I think that’s way beyond what anyone can do.”
read more here

I buried a lot of people in my lifetime and most of the time I was depressed as hell about it. My ex-husband tried to kill me our last night together and after that level of betrayal, it crossed my mind that I didn't deserve to live. That was over 30 years ago before I met my current husband. Imagine if we had the internet back then. What would have happened if I actually shared that feeling online? Would my boss find out about what I managed to keep secret from him? What would he have done if he knew? I worked hard for him and he trusted my judgement but I have a feeling he would have treated me differently if he had known what I was going through.

It is up to me who I share things with and up to my judgement to decide if I trust them or not. I don't expect them to share my secrets with anyone the same way I cannot share secrets at all as a Chaplain. To think that someone I don't know is tracking what I tell a friend on Facebook makes me sick to my stomach. It limits what I do share and considering my profile has been viewed over 10 million times while Wounded Times reaches people around the world, I am picky what I share in the first place. As for the rest of it, there is always email and the thing called a phone people used to speak into instead of thumbing through life as if they are communicating.